The soldiers fanned out onto the road, "escorted" by some of the Queen's best, each eye trying to not look at the corpse still staring wide eyed ahead. No one had been able to close the lids after the explosion, but a few kept a torch or two handy in case the cart needed to become a pyre quickly.
Ciara turned away from the window, trying to rub some life back into her aching shoulders, and back, and when did she get a star shaped bruise on her thigh? Balm would have to come later, there were still...well, no, actually, there were no chores to do. She had already unlocked the small guest room she crashed in after they peeled themselves off the top of the tower, and was midway into the hall when the question of what to do next hit her.
One of the few servants of the keep, a scrawny man with a strange hop to his stride, walk/skipped past, a string of ribbon behind him. She fought back the urge to chase after, fearing something had gone horrifically wrong in the kitchen. This was about the time her mother would be prepping the cook for breakfast.
Instead, Ciara rapped her fingers against the door next to hers, humming a bit under her breath. No noise answered back, so she knocked again, putting her entire knuckle into it. As she raised her fist for a third knock the door burst open and a witch with half her hair wadded to one side of her head blinked up blearily at the intruder.
"What? Gods, it's not even dawn yet," Isa whined, not much of a morning person. She'd been trying to train the night owl out of herself for nearly twenty years, but it never took. Witches and midnight were classics for a reason.
"I wondered if you were up and wanted something to eat," Ciara said diplomatically, trying to not smile as Isa rubbed dust from her eyes and coughed.
"Yeah. Food. That's good," the witch said, surprisingly compliant. Her broken arm was bound tightly across her chest.
"Are you all right?"
Isa reached her good hand behind her collar and extracted a pile of straw from out the back of her dress. She looked at it and blinked for a moment before tossing it aside, "Yes, though you'd think the 'king' could afford better stuffing than straw for a bed."
Ciara leaned in past the witch to spy a nest of straw stripped from its bale and wadded up in the corner, only a blanket tossed over it to belie it wasn't an animal's bed. The lone brazier hissed and popped as the last chunks of fuel cried its death throes. "I see." Accommodations were on more of a 'first find, first serve' basis, but there'd been real beds with mattresses scattered across the keep; the witch only needed to ask.
Isa yawned and stretched, trying to delay the thoughts rattling around in her brain, "Truth to share, I am uncertain what to do now?"
"Typically, after a night in straw I prefer a hard bath and an even harder breakfast," Ciara said, smiling.
The witch frowned, her first since the goblin sacrificed himself, "Humorous. I refer to my life. It...it was not something I could ever control."
"Now you have every opportunity ahead of you."
"Yes, and that is perhaps the least comforting thought of them all," Isa muttered, staring at her hand. She felt the threads of the world opening to her in ways they never had before. It was exhilarating and terrifying. Her stomach rumbled loudly, demanding attention, "But you mentioned something about nourishment?"
Ciara laughed, and pointed towards the hall, "Down the stairs and to the left is the kitchen."
"You're not following?"
"I should check on them first," she said, a small frown taking her face.
The witch sighed, "Very well. I'm so ravenous I could destroy a nest of dragon eggs." And without saying her goodbyes, Isa trumped off in the direction of the kitchen.
Ciara sighed and walked down the hall, taking the staircase up. Her fingers trailed along doors, most either occupied by the handful of Albrant's men in recovery, or discarded cutlery and bedding, moved to make room for soldiers. She paused at the room where the assassin pulled Matilda in for them all to hide, and opened the door.
She expected a quiet room, with a few candles flickering softly against the drawn shutters. But a robe, not as blue as it had once been, flickered about the over warm room along with its owner.
"Now now, this won't hurt a bit."
"Ah! I shall gut your mother's lower intestines, priest!" the patient shrieked from the bed.
"Come now, it was simply a bit of alcohol. That wound's not going to clean itself," Kynton slipped the liquored rag into a wash basin and leaned back, "Intestines? Really?"
The patient gritted his teeth as he tried to rise up, "I am saving the better parts for when you bring out that foul, pink liquid again."
Kynton laughed, and rose, limping towards the door, "Oi, looks like you have a visitor," he called to the assassin as he stirred the foul pink liquid in the cauldron over the fire.
Taban tried to sit up fully, but as his side seized up, he slipped down and waved his good hand up at Ciara, "Hello, Nightingale."
"How are you feeling?" she asked, inching towards the sick bed.
"When your torturous priest isn't poking or prodding my wound with his sticky fingers, I am well enough."
Kynton snorted loudly, "Were it not for my 'sticky fingers,' you'd have bled out all over the King's recently sun roofed keep."
"It may have been preferable," Taban muttered, surprisingly good-naturedly for the assassin.
Ciara pulled the chair over and sat beside the assassin. Most of his color had returned through the night, but there was no doubt he'd been on a hair's whisper to visit the Raven Lady. Thank Scepticar, and probably Argur as well, that Kynton suffered no major damage in his fall. Only a bruised tailbone and ego. He'd flittered about the injured, talking up a storm about how he'd have easily bested the General and the Emperor and a few griffins if he'd been able to get his hands on a sword. Luckily, most of his patients were unconscious.
"Priest," Taban called out, "Can you give us a moment of privacy?"
"Probably," Kynton said jovially, and returned back to his stirring, humming under his breath.
The assassin sighed. Kynton banged his spoon against the side dramatically and looked back at the bed, "Oh, you mean right this instant? But your foul pink liquid might boil over."
Taban cursed in Dunner but Ciara smiled at Kynton and said, "Isa's up and already making her way to the kitchens."
"What? That bewitching temptress will not get the last sticky roll before me," he said before wadding up his robes in his hands and making a limping run towards the door. He turned right, and dashed down the hall.
"God and the devil take him," Taban muttered, sinking back into his bed.
"You didn't have to do it," Ciara said slowly.
"Believe me, you have not spent time with the man. He deserves every spite known to deity and demon. And perhaps a few neither have concocted yet."
She smiled at the idea of Kynton running from small demons zapping him, much the way Isa does. "That isn't what I meant." Her brown eyes fixed upon the bedridden assassin, "You told me once there was nearly nothing worth dying for."
Taban shifted uncomfortably, his wound welling up under the bandages, "Only three, as I recall."
"Right, three, your Triad." Taban coughed loudly at her assumption but let Ciara continue, "So why put your life in danger for me?"
The assassin gingerly touched his wound and winced, it would be many moons before he could properly lift a blade, much less string a bow. He hated healing. "First, you should know that the three, the three I would gladly spend my life to save, are not the Triad."
A warm smile overtook his face as his memory slipped back to a small home, heated with love and the spice of the goat roasting on the fire, "I think often about my sevda, my wife. She gives me strength no matter how far my feet take me from her. And our two girls, the youngest I only saw glimpses of before I began this madness. She'd be almost walking now." He shook his head sadly, time was the one thing he could never control no matter how much he wished it so. "And the eldest, a fire burns brightly in her, not yet five and she'd already
taken on a pack of street filth to defend her name."
Ciara shifted in her seat, trying to not watch the weep of the dagger wound as Taban reminisced, "Why not return to them?"
He blinked those honeyed eyes and turned to her, his mind crossing the sharp divide of countries, "Forgive me, I forget myself sometimes. The warmth of home is preferable to the cold of travel."
Taban looked at his hands, cracked and rough over the years of his work, one finger missing a nail that stubbornly refused to grow back, "I told you once that each of us owes our flesh to another...mine is simply taking much longer to break even. The Triad asks of us all we can give, and then a little more. Put your soul in service to the Lords and your body will follow."
"Why me, then? Why risk your own flesh for someone you barely know?" the man was too practical for sentimentality. Ciara needed the real answer.
The assassin shifted in his bed, "You must promise to not breathe an utterance of what I tell you. Sharing the secrets of the Triad could result in utter damnation and holey socks," she nodded along, but suspected it was a joke. "My mission was not entirely to protect your King, nor to slay the Emperor. In fact, I suspect that tidbit will not sit kindly upon the Lord of Noble's shoulders. No, I was entrusted with one simple task, to make certain the magic not be impeded. Even my own people believed in the Casir Prophecies. That fact will not sit well with the Lord of Commons, he so enjoyed his little predictions."
"So you knew that only my blood, or someone's like it, could help the Caretaker do...whatever it was he did." Scholars would be trying to parse the spell the goblin weaved for centuries and at best only come up with 'Well, whatever it was it made a major mess.'
Taban laughed, "No, no, I confess I was as in the shade as the rest of your ragtag team. We do not only pay for our flesh with work and fulfilling orders, one can also trade with a fresh recruit. Or several, depending upon your worth."
Ciara leaned back, crossing her arms, "Me. You wanted to trade me for your freedom? What? Were you going to drug and kidnap me across the boarder?"
"No, no, no," Taban waved his arms, realizing he'd stepped onto a cultural land mine, "nothing such as that. The vow must be heartfelt and true, it cannot be forced or coerced."
"And why would I want that? To sell myself for a country I do not know, to a life I couldn't possibly understand?"
The assassin looked out the window, staring into the distance, "Before your King, your old one, was beheaded, what life lay before you?"
"Ah," Ciara started, as the words slipped through her teeth. A life of cleaning up after, and keeping alive man sized children in metal armor. It didn't have the punch she'd hoped for.
Taban nodded, reading her thoughts, "And now? You will always be an outsider, never truly welcomed into the over-endowed bosom of the Ostero royalty. It is not their way," he snorted to himself and admitted, "nor is it ours, either."
"I can go back, help rebuild the castle," Ciara said stubbornly, even as the idea turned to ash in her mouth. She hadn't been able to face Albrant since she let him live.
"Nightingale," Taban said, shaking his head as if he were admonishing one of his own daughters for trying to sneak a pet snake into the house, "I can offer you a life of adventure, of acceptance, of freedom."
"A freedom trapped, an adventure on someone else's terms, an acceptance with conditions," Ciara shot back, trying to hide her interest in his offer. To become a rogue, living on the edge of society...it was rather romantic.
"You would be a darling in court," he laughed at her quick wit, "easily charm each of the Lords."
A commotion, like a herd of wild horses crashing through a gate, broke across the hall and the pair looked over at the doorway as Kynton rushed past, muttering under his breath about the damn keep needing a "You are Here, Dragons be There" map. His blue blurred across the threshold as he headed in the proper direction.
Ciara chuckled, wiping away the previous conversation as if it were a harmless stain. The assassin knew when to plant a seed, and when to leave it to grow. He leaned up and struggled to place a foot to the ground.
"What are you doing?" Ciara called, standing up as Taban put another foot to the ground.
"It is never wise to remain in one place for overlong," he said, getting his second foot to the floor.
"Here, let me help you," and the girl hooked her arm around the assassin's shoulder, taking a lot of weight upon her.
The irony was not lost on Taban as his eyes searched hers before asking, "Do you think they'll have some oatmeal left?"
"Oatmeal? Really?"
The assassin shrugged, "I fear I have become addicted to the spackle."
He should have slept.
The stench of moldy wood carried across the courtyard, as the few knights still upright split the firewood. With every swing of the ancient axe, they'd look behind to gaze at the boy trying to not hover as visions of an old Dwarven mechanism he read about danced through his muddled brain.
"Sire! Sire!" the shrill voice trailed behind the man in far too delicate slippers as he plowed through the mud.
Aldrin sighed and turned away from the few workingmen. The fresh velvet tunic bunched around his shoulders and he pulled at the arms as he faced the sniveling toady Albrant's men found dug in safe in the launder's room. He couldn't remember the name well, but the droopy eyes and jutting upper jaw put him in mind of a greying basset hound.
"You should not call me that..." Bernard? Bartlet? Aldrin was fairly certain it began with a 'B.'
"Yes, Sire," the not Bernard said as he bowed deeply. Aldrin tried to not roll his eyes, but he felt a sigh slip loose. "You are needed urgently with the Queen, there is much urgent news to attend to. Urgently."
"Very well, take me to her."
He really should have slept.
The night was complicated, with his men rounding upon the invaders and the invaders rounding upon his men, then he managed to garble out a cease-fire with that General of theirs. And just as everyone was settling down for a glaring match over tea, Moren marched her army right up to the front gate.
That was another handful of hours lost to people bickering over the proper pronunciation of "hat rack." Then there were the bodies to clean up, the servants to reassure, and a line that needed succeeding. It'd be months before the gentry could be summoned for a proper reclamation, and gods knew Aldrin wasn't ready for that test of strength and prowess to claim the throne.
Moren slumped off with her lieutenants, and generals, and commanders, claiming most of what had once been a parlor for her command center. She'd politely suggested Aldrin get some rest, and he'd wandered off in search of a quiet bed, but as he passed the room that still held his brother's corpse his legs kept walking and soon he found himself up to old tricks, watching the knights work.
The toady was babbling about coronations and dowries and other things that should probably be of Aldrin's concern now. He waved it all off with a nod, hoping he didn't accidentally call for anyone's execution. Toady paused at the parlor's door and readjusted the scrap of a hat on his head so it rested at a 45-degree angle. Aldrin blinked at him slowly, but didn't say a word. Fashion, right, another one of those "court things."
A far better manicured hand than the King's knocked against the door and a voice called out "Enter," with the kind of command Aldrin hoped to muster one day. He squared his shoulders and tried to rise to his full height, revealing his bare ankles to the world. Finding pants that fit were probably right after learning how to pass laws.
"Bonaventure," Moren called to the boy sauntering into her den. Some of the men crowded around her table bowed their heads, others looked at the toady beside Aldrin trying to piece together which of them was king.
"You wanted to see me?" Aldrin asked, parting the sea of men who smelled as if they'd ridden a fortnight on the back of a horse.
Moren nodded her head and said crisply to her men, "You are all dismissed. We need to discuss matters in private."
Aldrin didn't
look at the men as they shuffled out of the parlor, each staring down at the king. Moren smiled weakly upon him, before her eyes looked up, "You as well, Barnabas." The toady grimaced at being caught, but bowed deeply to hide it as he backed out of the room, ass first.
"Your brother's body has been recovered," Moren said slowly, her critical eyes watching Aldrin.
"Oh...good," the King answered back, blanking his mind.
She paused, her head tilting to one side, "We may have a small service here, or carry the body back to the Starton Estate to inter it with the others."
Aldrin nodded his bowed head, "The people loved him, the people will want to say their goodbyes," he looked up into hers, and a crystal fire emphasized his orders, "He will be interred at Starton."
"Very good," Moren said as if she were praising a dog for not crapping on the rug. "Strange man, that Emperor," her voice fell carefully as she sorted her words, "capturing the keep, locking all the armed men in a dungeon, and then, days later, assassinating the King in an unlocked room."
"Yes," Aldrin said, his words as crisp as fresh laundry, "It is impossible to understand the motives of the truly mad."
Moren watched him, expecting a torrential outpouring, but the boy remained bottled up, his shoulders stooped from a burden he'd never unpack. "That is true," she finally responded, letting him know in her way that his secret would never pass her lips, "onto other matters at hand. Your truce with that Marciano ensures us a brief respite from the Empire's long fingers, but war is certain. Revenge…" she shrugged. An eye for an eye, a head for a head, a king for an emperor. Would the cycle ever break?
"In the meantime," Moren continued, "we have a few men to reward. I've already floated the idea of Albrant for Duke after all his tireless efforts..."
"No."
Moren paused, her eyes narrowing at the first sign of resistance from Aldrin, "Beg pardon?"
"No, he deserves no laurels, no titles."
Moren folded her arms, "You may have taken your own path to get here, but he did endanger his own life and his mens to keep the King safe. That requires respect and admiration, or you shall find yourself very lonely when the Empire comes back."
The King's Blood Page 59