Rebel's Honor

by Gwynn White

“Keep telling yourself that, Lynx, and maybe you’ll begin to believe it. Just as well Heron is seven days away by train.”

  Lynx’s face flushed, and a stab of longing pierced her heart. “Leave Heron out of this.”

  “Whatever.” Kestrel lumbered to her feet. “I’m exhausted.” At the closest bedroom door, she stopped. “And by the way, keep your claws out of Tao. He’s mine.”

  Lynx’s jaw dropped. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Tao. He’s mine.”

  “Yes, I heard that, but—”

  “Oh please, Lynx. I saw the way you were flirting with him during dinner. Do us both a favor and content yourself with Lukan and Axel.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lynx demanded, unable to believe her sister’s temerity. “I was keeping Tao occupied while you cried over marrying him! Trust me, I have no interest in your betrothed.”

  “So what if I was tearful?” Kestrel’s face flushed, and she took a step toward Lynx. “I came here to hold your hand, so how about repaying me by minding your own business?”

  “Strange. I thought Lukan was my business. You had no problem spending most of the evening ogling him.”

  “And we both know what business that is,” Kestrel shot back. “To find out what’s behind the gemstones.”

  Lynx rocked back. “How do you know that?”

  “I have ears, Lynx, and after hours of listening to your tedious fiddle playing, I finally came to tell you to shut up.” Kestrel gave her a smug smile. “I’m so glad I did, given the fascinating discussion I overheard between you and Father. Even he believes I should have been the one to get Lukan. He said I would make a wonderful empress! But, as usual, you always get the best, leaving me with meager pickings.” Kestrel stomped into her bedroom. “I finally have a chance to make a life for myself, even if it is with Tao, and I’m not going to let you mess it up. Forget about the gemstones, Lynx, because you’ll find no support from me if you jeopardize our safety here.” She slammed the door.

  So much for Kestrel being an ally.

  Angry with herself for how she’d handled that, Lynx’s legs gave out, and she slid down the wall, landing her bustled backside on the deep-pile carpet.

  She had her answer: Kestrel would most certainly not watch her back while she scouted for information. The question now was: would her sister actively work against her?

  Chapter 17

  Lukan drained his chenna and slammed the goblet down onto the table. His father should have called an end to this interminable evening hours ago. He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Why was the old man taking so long? Even the dogs that scrapped for bones under the table had given up their vigil.

  He glanced at Tao. His brother’s eyes drooped, and his chin rested on his hand. Like the dogs, all Tao needed was to start dribbling—or snoring. Either would liven up the evening. Lukan smiled despite his frustration.

  The sound of shattering glass split the air, prompting Tao to jolt upright. The signal to leave.

  His father had finally drained his chenna and thrown the goblet against the wall. Before any other chair squeaked, Lukan jerked back from the dining table and shot to his feet. Tao followed, relief blazing on his face. His brother tried to catch his eye, but Lukan elbowed past him and out into the passageway. It took all his self-control not to break into a sprint for the stairs leading to his apartment.

  Keep calm. People are watching. You have to be regal. Remember.

  Tao caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “Want to play dice? Anything to drown out the horror of this night. We can get Axel to join us.”

  Lukan shook his brother’s hand off his arm. “He’s the last person I need right now.” He hated Axel—the brilliant soldier, everyone’s golden boy—almost as much as he did his father, and Tao knew that. It had always grived him that Tao’s loyalty veered toward Axel.

  His brother sighed. “Okay, not Axel then, but not just the two of us, either. No offense, but I’m in need of decent company.”

  Lukan shoved Tao’s chest. “What’s gotten into you? I told you, I’m not taking the blame for your marriage, so you can stop flirting with Lynx and shoving your resentment at me. And how many times must I tell you to show some respect for the Dragon? If we don’t, how can we expect loyalty from our subjects?”

  “A game of dice, Lukan, that’s it. I’m not interested in dragons, or Lynx, or Kestrel, or marriage, or resentment, or anything else. Not right now.”

  “No.” Lukan turned his back on Tao and stalked down the passage toward his apartment. As much as it stung, he needed to mentally rehash his first meeting with Lynx.

  Nothing had changed since summer. She was as distant and disdainful as she’d been then. That was a problem, because he still wanted her. Passionately.

  He had spent much of the evening imagining running his hands through her hair, over her lithe body, kissing her—everywhere—making love to her until she cried out, begging him for more.

  And that was where his fantasy faltered and reality bit.

  Lynx hadn’t been interested in him last summer, and she sure as hell wasn’t interested in him now.

  As for her comments about the Dragon, well . . . they bordered on the seditious. He had no belief in the Dragon as a god, but he knew the value of the icon in governing the masses. To worship the Dragon was to worship the emperor. Lynx’s contempt was abundantly concerning, coming from a woman who could very well be the mother of the son foreordained to destroy him and his empire.

  “She’s quite the girl, isn’t she?” a disembodied voice asked in his head, like a probing finger.

  As much as he hated the intrusion, Lukan’s footsteps didn’t falter. What do you want, Thurban?

  “An unprecedented challenge faces you, Crown Prince. Are you equal to it?”

  Lukan guessed Thurban referred to Lynx. He bristled at the suggestion that anyone, dead or alive, would dare question his abilities. Of course I am.

  “Lynx is no ordinary girl, Lukan. She’s a Norin of the most rabid kind.”

  That doesn’t mean I can’t control her, Lukan shot back. Refusing to engage further in a conversation he didn’t want, he focused his thoughts on other, more pleasant things: the provocative sway of Lynx’s hips as she walked, the curve of her breasts, her legs, long and shapely, wrapped around him.

  It was the only way he knew how to dislodge Thurban.

  The day Thurban’s voice had appeared in his head, Lukan had almost choked on his soup. It had happened some weeks before his father had announced the wedding. It had taken all his acting skills to cover up his shock when, after he had caught his breath, the voice introduced itself as Thurban, Chenaya’s first emperor.

  Telling anyone at the dining table was out of the question. They would have called him mad, insane, unfit to rule. He would quickly share his father’s well-deserved epithet: Mad Lukan.

  Unable to endure such a humiliation, he had shot to his feet and rushed to the palace archive, the only place in the empire where books were permitted. Many of the manuscripts, printouts, and blueprints, all scientific and technical in nature, had survived the Burning.

  When just a lad, Lukan had discovered the original copy of the Treaty of Hope signed after the Burning. Like all books, he had devoured it, discovering that the nations had agreed to destroy all printed matter—mankind’s desperate attempt to prevent a future annihilation.

  Young as he was, it had shocked Lukan rigid that anyone would consider burning books. They were his lifeline, the only things that kept him sane in a palace where warfare, games of strategy, and jousting were everything.

  Thankfully, despite proclaiming allegiance to the Treaty of Hope, Thurban had used the chaos after the Burning to order scholars to comb through the ruined cities and towns of the world. They had assembled all the books they could find. Those works formed the basis of the archives.

  Over the last four hundred years, successive emperors had added to it as chemists, engineers, and scientists—hidden away
from the public eye in far reaches of the empire—expanded the old technologies.

  The day Lukan first heard Thurban’s voice, he knew that if it had been generated by the living—anything was possible in Chenaya—he would find evidence of the technology in one of the books in the archives.

  But, after hours of fruitless searching through titles in the archives’ catalogue, Lukan had been forced to admit defeat. There were no tomes explaining the technology needed to create voices in the head. The only reference at all to voices was contained in the journal of Prince Maksim, a long-forgotten crown prince. Settled in his usual leather chair, he had read the book from cover to cover.

  From the cryptic writing—apparently Maksim had also been reluctant to admit to insanity—Lukan gleaned that other crown princes had also been harassed by unseen beings, even appearances by the ghosts themselves. They had provided the inspiration for the Dreaded.

  All of these visitors from beyond the grave either supported or railed against Dmitri and his curse.

  Lukan had left the archives in an even greater panic than when he had entered it. In the ensuing weeks, he became inured to Thurban’s voice.

  And, he admitted, one good thing had come out of hearing Thurban: it explained generations of emperors’ obsession with perpetuating the Dreaded. If ghosts tormented crown princes, calling on them to support the overthrow of the empire, what happened in everyone else’s heads?

  Deep in thought, Lukan jumped the steps to his apartment two at a time. Once in the privacy of his room, he would give some thought to a strategy to handle Lynx’s frosty welcome.

  His apartment door loomed. He stepped inside, closed it behind him—and frowned. A Chenayan flag hung limply on a staff in the middle of the room, the black Dragon dull against faded red and gold silk. It wasn’t there when he and Tao had left the room. More offended by its ragged appearance than the oddity of its presence, he darted over to take it down.

  He never made it.

  In a blur of light, the walls of his room vanished. His first thought was that Felix had set up a display of Dreaded, but then the wood paneling and tapestries were replaced by an army so vast, it blotted out all traces of the landscape. An endless patchwork of skin tones, the army’s only unifying feature was the firmament of blue banners, spangled with stars, under which it camped.

  He recognized the constellation: Nicholas the Light-Bearer.

  Too elaborate to be Dreaded. What the hell is it?

  His eyes widened as his own flag unfurled. Flexing black wings, the Dragon soared out of the tattered silk, growing to a monstrous size as it took to the air. It glided down in front of him, enveloping him in its shadow, transfixing him with its red eyes.

  Heart threatening to explode, Lukan fell back. But the Dragon clearly had things other than attack on its mind. Its huge body bulged, and its head writhed. Screeching, it tore at its own scales and flesh. Lukan watched spellbound as the Dragon’s inner enemy emerged with each bite.

  It was a young man.

  Brushing sable-dark hair from his jet-black eyes, the man stepped away from the tattered remains, looking down at it briefly with a hero’s sneer of contempt. He strode to the blue army, grabbed a flag, and held it high for everyone to see.

  “It’s me,” Lukan whispered in disbelief.

  “Lukan, Crown Prince of Chenaya,” a voice he didn’t recognize said, “see what awaits you. A son who will torment and plague you all the days of your life.”

  Lightning zigzagged from the cloudless sky, striking his doppelganger in the face. The young man’s image flickered and then re-ignited. He now looked at Lukan through glacial blue eyes.

  Lynx’s eyes.

  With a derisive smile, he fixed those blue icicles on something behind Lukan. Following his gaze, Lukan saw great plumes of smoke billowing from the roof of the Avanov palace. He watched as the inferno devoured his home, the seat of his government, the heart of his empire.

  Lightning sparked again and struck the man in the face. As he crumbled to ash, the smoke from the palace was sucked back into the roof, and the flames guttered and died.

  The image flashed and then vanished.

  Lukan sank to the floor, trying to make sense of what he’d seen. He had lived all his life with the Dreaded, designed to terrify and control his subjects. What he’d seen here was nothing like any of those.

  It had to be a vision. The kind he had read about in Maksim’s journal. He writhed, a thousand phantom ants crawling over him.

  Did it confirm that he would be the emperor cursed to be murdered by his own son? But if so, then why did the Dragon rise again to destroy his enemy? Nothing made sense.

  But whatever it meant, surely even his father must see that marrying Lynx was impossible if this would result? How to communicate that to Mad Mott was the biggest challenge.

  Lukan had no answers that wouldn’t get him beaten to a pulp. Desperate for company to counter his fear, he slammed his apartment door shut and raced to the gambling room he knew Tao—and unfortunately, Axel—frequented. With each step he took, anger mounted in his chest.

  A high-born man turned the corner and almost bumped in to Lukan.

  “What do you want here?” Lukan yelled at the top of his voice. “Get out of my way.”

  The man bobbed a bow, then fled the way he’d come.

  Lukan slumped against the wall, even angrier with himself than he was at the high-born, his father, or the vision.

  What’s the point of working on my image if I scream at people? The bastard shouldn’t have been here.

  But even as he thought that, he knew it was stupid. The man lived in the palace; he had every right to walk the halls.

  Lukan had to get a grip. His temper had run riot since Thurban started talking to him. He couldn’t let these weird supernatural things mess with his control like this.

  In the face of the worst provocation his father could inflict on him, he’d always managed to appear poised and regal, a man above his circumstances. He had prided himself on that achievement the way Axel strutted around boasting about battlefield conquests.

  It was only when his heart stopped pounding that he entered the gambling room.

  As to be expected, Tao was with Axel and Stefan.

  Lukan stopped at the door to watch them and sighed.

  They were playing tiles, a game of military strategy he loathed. No matter how many times he played the stupid game, he always lost. When he was younger, he had even taken lessons from some of Chenaya’s most decorated generals—but to no avail. Whatever tricks he was taught, Axel always knew how to counter him. He had stopped playing tiles years ago.

  Axel looked up, caught sight of him, and smiled. It was not a pretty sight.

  “Lukan, our beloved crown prince,” Axel drawled in his usual mocking tone.

  Both Tao and Stefan turned to stare.

  His cousin laughed and said to Tao, “I’ve been spending way too much time with Mother Saskia.”

  Heartbreakingly, Tao joined in the laughter. At least Stefan had enough respect to stand and bow, which was more than he could say for Axel.

  Lukan’s skin burned with anger at the affront. He took a deep breath and shook his shoulders to force his muscles to relax.

  Axel kicked out a chair. “Lukan, come, sit. It’s been a long time since we’ve battled each other over tiles.”

  Lukan took the chair. “Don’t get your hopes up, Axel. I have an urge to play dice.” He reached across the table and picked up an unopened pack of dice. He was about to crack the seal when Axel laughed.

  Like every encounter with Axel and his cronies, this was turning out to be humiliating.

  Axel reached over and took the pack from his hands and tossed it onto an empty table next to them. “Not a chance. If you want part of our action, you play by our rules. And tiles it is.”

  Lukan leaped to his feet. Eyes fixed on Tao, he said, “And you say I’m bad company?”

  Without waiting for Tao to reply, he left th
e room. Nothing this side of hell would induce him to spend any more time here. Not when he had to face Lynx in the morning.

  Chapter 18

  “Open the door, Princess.”

  Lynx groaned, rolled out of bed, and stumbled across the deep-pile carpet to the door.

  The she-witch was there, holding out a candle. “Dress,” she commanded. “The emperor summons you. I will take you to his chambers.”

  Shock pierced Lynx like a sword. But this hateful woman would never be privy to that.

  Feigning nonchalance, Lynx asked, “What time is it?” She held up her wrist. “I wouldn’t need to ask, but someone took it upon herself to destroy my watch.”

  The she-witch’s lips twitched. She swallowed and then said in a conciliatory tone, “Let bygones be bygones, Princess Lynx. I’ve discovered, to my cost, that life is too fragile . . . fleeting, even, to bear grudges.” The priestess’s breath hitched. “In fact, my dear, this may well be the last time we see each other.”

  Lynx jerked upright. What in the world could have happened to the woman? Was it possible the priestess was human and not just the emperor’s tool, bent on destroying all individuality?

  Too little, too late. Lynx took the candle. Once the door closed, she headed for her dressing room, bigger even than her tent in Norin. A maid had hung up the garments Uncle Bear had given her. None of Mother Saskia’s “proper” dresses had made it into the collection. That left her with limited choices. Bustle firmly in place, she slipped on an elegant—or at least she thought it grand—green dress. Her hands trembled as she laced her corset. Without thinking to brush her hair, she rushed to the door to meet the she-witch.

  They walked in silence past the guardsmen at the entrance to her apartment.

  Lynx made special note of features to help her navigate. A statue of an unknown emperor glared at her from a column, then she passed a wall of stained glass windows, a tapestry depicting a black dragon in full flight, and a wall covered with flags that once belonged to the conquered. A stuffed snow leopard and her cubs were the last notable sight before the parquet floor gave way to slick, marble tiles. Although the furnishings changed, one thing remained constant: the absence of people, aside from the occasional patrolling guardsman.