by Kari Cordis
“He’s like our own son,” Lord Harthunter had protested in his warm, mild voice. “And a wonderful companion to Loren—”
“He’s a TROUBLEMAKER and drags Loren into it with him! He is not the kind of companion the future master of Harthunters needs, a penniless parasite that will be forever attached to his coinpurse…”
“I think Loren’s actually more at fault for their trouble,” Ari had heard Lord Harthunter chuckling. Their voices had faded out behind Ari as he strode quickly away, so shocked he could hardly breathe. It had never occurred to him that he wasn’t wanted, that he was a burden, that he was ever anything less than Loren’s brother.
It had taken him the last several months to come to terms with it. He was never going back, ever. And Loren…well, Loren would never understand.
But now, incredibly, he’d been given a respite from having to come up with a believable excuse, which had been looking increasingly impossible the closer they got to end of term. Melkin had decided to keep them in sight this summer, all of them—on his summer sabbatical trip. Ari was still stunned; Rodge had been furious when his parents gushingly agreed, but Ari felt nothing but relief. Cravenly, of course, because it meant he wouldn’t have to tell Loren a single thing for several months. And who knew what kind of opportunities might present themselves as excuses in the course of such a trip?
He shifted uneasily on the stone floor. Melkin had done little more than throw some old skins down for them, but Ari’d spent more nights than he could count sleeping out on hard ground. It wasn’t his bed making him restless…he’d seen a warm, living person turned into a cold corpse before his eyes today. By a Dra, no less. A living person that had meant them serious harm, judging by Melkin’s innuendos. And then there was Melkin, who was somehow in cahoots with said Dra, and who for some reason was deeply and intensely involved in their suddenly flipped-over world. If he was at all the sort of person you could have a normal conversation with, there were several things Ari would have liked to ask him. Not the least of which was…what that intruder was doing with Sheelsteel.
“Where are we going?” Rodge demanded irritably, a little out of breath because they were climbing the steep hill of the Mounte. His travelsack jounced around on his skinny shoulders, a toothcleaner threatening to fall out one side and the toe of spare hose dangling out the other. There had been little improvement in his mood overnight, despite the stone floor, terrifying interview, and traumatic events of the preceding hours, and he’d been clearly articulating why to anyone who would listen. He’d be copying Mathematics and Physics scrolls all through the next semester to make up for this summer. His parents were spineless sycophants for rolling over like trained pooches and gushing that their son had been invited to accompany his ‘esteemed professor’ on a research trip. But loudest of all was his pronouncement that he HATED Applied Natural Sciences and had never spent a night outdoors in his life.
“Maybe to the Palace,” Loren said eagerly. As far as he was concerned, he and Ari would’ve spent the whole summer camping out and adventuring anyway—he’d agreed to Melkin’s announcement with perhaps unseemly enthusiasm, given the circumstances.
Rodge scowled at him. “Oh, doubtless. I’m sure Queen Sable’s got nothing better to do than entertain demented subjects who fancy themselves Imperial Investigators and bestow her blessing on a trio of enslaved University students. This isn’t exactly a quest for the honor and glory of the Empire, gravy-head—we’re probably going to be studying toad droppings.”
“Why else would we climb Palace Hill?” Ari asked logically. “We’d go around if we were trying to leave town by any of the Gates.” If he thought logic would be soothing to Rodge’s outraged sense of justice, he was mistaken. You could have grilled a steak with the look he was shot.
“I wonder if she’ll have the Diamond Scepter,” Loren rattled on insensitively. “I’ve heard it shoots rainbows in a thousand different directions when the sun hits it…”
“That’s because it’s glass,” Rodge snapped in atrocious temper, “and that would be the prism effect—which you would know if you ever paid attention in Physics.”
“It’s a Diamond!” Loren, a devout Marekite, insisted. “Everyone knows it’s a triele.”
“Do you honestly think the gods need stones to channel their power?”
This might have gone on ‘til the next Age had they not topped out on the Mounte…and taken the unmistakable turn towards the Palace Grounds. Loren’s face lit up in delight. Rodge looked almost comically astounded, which he quickly changed back to a scowl.
Ari, grinning, quickened his pace to catch up with Melkin and Kai, who were striding ahead over the rough cobblestones. Kai looked the same this morning—lethal—but Melkin had traded his rich robes for a traveler’s cloak, already stained and well-worn. With old boots on his feet and his grey hair whipped by the wind, he looked like he’d already been on the road for weeks.
As the guards waved them through the gates and into the leafy forests of the Grounds, Ari gazed around in respectful awe. There’d been a huge controversy over the new Palace. When tottering old King Carnelian had finally tottered over, the Imperial Council had leapt at the opportunity to update the Empire’s image for the new, young Queen. This had been years before Ari and Loren had started University, but they’d been afflicted with the whole saga in History of the Modern North. The Traditionalists had lost out overwhelmingly to the Progressives, and the old timber and stone survive-a-siege style fortress was torn down. The new Palace was built using new technology, blocks lighter and cheaper than marble but the same look. Wouldn’t stop an arrow, they said, but scored high in aesthetic value. New, park-like Grounds filled in the moats, new statues and poet’s squares graced ground where the crumbling old walls had stood guard for centuries, and the old strictures about having nothing around to catch fire...well, it was a new Age, after all, and the Enemy was long gone.
The main, top-most Palace turret came into view with the huge red flag of the Imperial North snapping awesomely from its peak. In the flag’s center, in bold, conical white, the outline of the Triple Mountain was stitched. Below it, on another turret, flew a dark blue banner crossed with silver swords—and Ari remembered with a start that the King of Merrani was in town.
There was another brief stop at the Gate to the Inner Keep, where one of the guards curled his lip as Kai passed, then they were entering a busy world of walls and gardens and courtyards and gates, all of it glass-smooth white stone and spring greenery. Everywhere, Palace officials in the snow and scarlet scurried busily around on the thousand different errands and duties that kept the Realm running.
“Harthunters isn’t even this busy on feast days,” Loren whispered, awed, to Ari. Fond as he was of the estate, Ari figured the Imperial Palace of the North probably had an edge on it, both in duties and acreage.
They came up behind Melkin and Kai, stopped at a side door in the shadow of one of the soaring white walls. The boys crowded close up on them excitedly, but neither of the men seemed particularly affected—oddly at ease, in fact. Ari felt like a country yokel. Once they entered the Palace proper, he had to keep reminding himself to close his gaping mouth.
Inside, deep carpets of Imperial scarlet sank beneath their rough boots. Walls of alabaster white filled their view, their endless corridors full of fabulous, fantastic works of art. There were priceless Cyrrhidean vases with colors so brilliant they looked like bits of jewels. Light glinted off the real copper woven into tapestry-quality Aerach rugs, making them glint like they were aflame. A sumptuously detailed, damascened blade of some Great Hero hung encased in glass, the scabbard encrusted with enough gems to set Ari up for several lifetimes.
Distracted, staring, whispering, the boys almost ran into Melkin and Kai. They were stopped again, this time before an ornate, opalescent set of doors that arched into a graceful point over their heads. Melkin was growling something tersely to one of the guards. Dra Kai, silent and motionless beside him, looked rathe
r barbaric in this setting, what with his bare bronze arms and brief, close-fitting clothing. The guard talking to Melkin turned away, looking disdainful, and headed pompously off down a side hall. As they all waited for him to return, the boys eyed the remaining guard in a very one-sided scrutiny. These were Queensguard, an elite bunch never seen by the public unless the Queen herself was out on display, and they came with the appropriate high self-regard. Their tunics were blinding white leather, undertunics and breeches deep red, and the Triple Mountain in silver on their collars. A beautifully draped scarlet cloak hung from this one’s shoulders, and silverwork gleamed ostentatiously in the light of the gas lanterns.
Ari was still gazing at him, envious and wondering what it took to be a Royal Guard, when the other guard returned. He gazed down his nose at them, saying curtly and without much support for the idea, “She’ll see you now.” And before Ari could really get a grasp on what exactly that implied, the door had been opened. They were ushered into a small sitting room—which, as it already held two of the largest men he’d ever seen, promptly shrank around him.
As they entered, someone was saying in a deep, amused voice, “Whoever told you that is slipperier than fish eggs, Sable.”
It was one of the men, but Ari’s eyes slid promptly off of him, mind sucked clean of coherent thought by the sight of the slim young woman standing nearby. Seeing her from a distance on Parade didn’t do the Queen of the North justice. She looked like a young girl as she stood quietly by the one window, hands around a cup of tea, her dark brown hair jumbled in glossy waves around her shoulders. Technically, she was a young girl. Her dress was southern Empire, simple cotton and plain white, though there was delicate embroidery on the hem and wide sleeves. Her clear complexion and the wide eyes of pansy blue, in combination with her loose hair, made her look about sixteen. The boys, all having adopted identical frozen positions pressed against one wall, gawked.
Near her, long legs stretched casually out in front of him as he rested on the window ledge, was a gigantic man who could only be the King of the Eastern Seas. Stormy grey-blue eyes looked out of a face like weathered wood. Thick, dark waves of hair, shot at the temples with silver, crested over his big forehead. It covered the bearded jaw, too, which had the durable look normally attributed to granite. Ari thought instantly that he looked exactly like a King should: wise, noble, solemn, strong.
An impression immediately marred by his huge guffaw at something the Queen said. The entire room shook, reverberating off Ari’s eardrums like a bell had clanged next to him. “And did you tell him that?” he demanded, at a decibel level that was surely making Melkin envious.
“Oh, nevermind, Kane,” she answered crossly. “We’ll talk about it later.” And then so smoothly there was hardly a pause, she turned to say, “Good morning, Master Melkin. School out?”
Melkin grunted at her exactly as he would a trying student, and while the boys’ eyes bulged at this familiarity, Melkin pulled something from the folds of his traveling cloak and handed it to her.
She took it blankly—it was the dagger Kai had pulled off the boys’ intruder—while Melkin gave a few terse words of explanation.
“Kai found two cutthroats lurking around the University yesterday afternoon. We barely stopped a third from committing the unthinkable in these boys’ room. He had this little trinket on him.”
Sable’s clear eyes lifted in surprise to the three subjects decorating her wall, who were also surprised. Melkin had not shared the fact that their intruder had come with friends. For a moment, dead silence reigned, and a tight little frown began to pucker her brows. King Kane took the knife from her loose fingers, lifting it to turn it thoughtfully in the light from the window.
“This is Sheelsteel,” he said, almost accusingly. His voice had dropped to a menacing growl, the formidable chin jutting, the dark eyes hostile. The boys quailed. Merranics were said to fear nothing on the battlefield—a trait most Northerners attributed to lack of discernment. Ari was a bit more forgiving normally, but the combination of size and proximity was altering his view.
Sable looked between the three men, to the knife, then back to the men. “Oh, no. Don’t,” she implored them. “This is quite serious enough on its own without all your paranoid superstitions warping things out of proportion…no doubt this is an old relic from someone’s grandfather. There’s all kinds of steel lying around the Empire from the Wars—”
“Anything else?” Kane interrupted her to ask Dra Kai. She rolled her eyes.
The Dra shrugged, but Melkin said, “One of them carried a purse full of tirna stamped with the Ramparts, but anyone doing business in the south of the Empire could carry the same.”
Sable looked at him approvingly for saying something reasonable. “Why the University? Why these boys?” she asked crisply.
Said boys’ ears perked up and they held their breath, wondering if their Master had come to any conclusions they didn’t know about.
“Search me,” Melkin growled, glaring dourly at them. “I spent a good part of the evening trying to discover some kind of connection or a motive, and came up with only three empty-headed adolescents.”
“Still,” Kane said slowly, deep voice thrumming through the room, “it’s a bad time for the Enemy’s weapons to be showing up…regardless of where—or when—they’re from.”
Sable looked at them firmly. “Please do not tell me you’re going to lay this alongside your improbable collection of evidence…” Both men avoided the question—also her eyes—Melkin frowning blackly at the thick carpet, Kane turning his attention back to the knife. She looked from one to the other and then turned deliberately to Dra Kai. “How do you read this?” she asked calmly.
The boys’ eyebrows rose. Drae weren’t exactly the cream of society—they were surprised he was even present.
He was either unaware or uncaring of his social status, looking quite unperturbed at being in the presence of so much high rank. His dark eyes gleamed in his expressionless face, and the light picked out the hard edges of muscle in his crossed arms. He looked patently out of place in the fussy sitting room, like a drawn sword laid out amongst children’s clothes.
“This is White Asp work,” he answered quietly, deep voice seeming to reverberate in the small room.
Both monarchs looked at him sharply. “Not again,” Sable said, so low it was almost a whisper. She shot Melkin and Kane a hard look, chiding them, “Any trouble involving the Asps is of much more tangible and pressing concern than the ghosts you three are chasing.”
Kane shot her an avuncular frown, then pressed Kai, “You’re sure?”
“You’re wrong,” Melkin interrupted, flatly accusing Sable and further upsetting the boys on the wall. She raised her delicate brows. “Mercenaries will be the least of your troubles if the south rises again.”
Silence like a tomb filled the room, which was suddenly an airless prison. Ari gulped, feeling himself starting to sweat. This was the same stuff Melkin ranted about in class occasionally—the main reason he was considered a little off his rocker. He couldn’t believe he spouted it to the Queen.
Sable sighed softly, lips turning up a little. “Well,” she said with bright sarcasm, “I assume you’ve brought these young men to me for protection from further heinous acts foreshadowing the downfall of the Empire?”
His silvery brows frowned darkly at her, but he didn’t respond for several seconds. When he did speak, he seemed more reluctant than angry. “No…actually, I’m taking them with me.”
“Taking them,” the Queen repeated. “Taking them where?”
He was definitely reluctant. “To Addah.”
The Thrones of the North and Merrani stared at him. Sable arched a graceful brow.
“Addah? Whatever for? I can’t believe you’re in the mood for a vacation in the Wolflands now.”
“Because I’m guessing that’s going to be the best place to unearth the old stories of Montmorency…and the Empress.”
If the wall
hadn’t been holding him up, Ari was sure he would’ve fallen. The Empress?
“You must be joking,” Sable said, dead-pan. “The legend of the Empress? What next? The Swords of Light swooping down to help us ward off the endless armies of Enemy??” Her voice changed a trifle, “Look, I started down this path because you said some things that made sense. But if you’re going to start delving into, literally, storytales—”
But Kane was looking very serious. “The Five Hundred Years of Peace,” he inserted into the Queen’s tirade of disbelief. Her head spun to look at him, pretty mouth dropping open.
“That’s ancient history!” she protested. “More tale than truth! The last great battle of the Ages of War—a legend of prophesied peace—I don’t even remember it.”
“Me neither,” Melkin said grimly. “And it’s not written up in a single chronicle, not a word in all the Histories. How can that be?” He shot her an accusing look.
She made a face at him. “Are you serious? I’ve been on the Throne seven years, Melkin—it’s not like I was responsible for keeping all the histories these past centuries.”
“So…” Kane mused, thumbing his lip thoughtfully. “You’re going to where history is still oral.”
“Merranic history is still oral, and a sight better than any flaming Illian’s,” a voice like good-natured thunder rumbled from behind them all. The boys jumped, having completely forgotten the other man in the room. He was probably the largest human they’d ever seen, and was presently crammed into one of the flowered armchairs. One pinky was wedged tightly into the ungenerous handle of a tiny teacup, which he was absently trying to shake off. His hair and beard were so brown, stiff, and abundant that they almost obscured his face.
“Well,” Sable said dryly.
“Our relations with the Illians were never as good as the North’s,” Kane explained, a little apologetically.
“Not enough diplomacy,” Sable said archly.