Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  Seneira was taken aback by the unexpected, almost ceremonial declaration.

  ‘What about me?’ grunted a tubby ball of fur, shaking himself off as he trundled over. He’s never fond of other people receiving gifts without him getting any. ‘I’m the one that did all the hard work on that job! Nearly got my hide chewed off by a gods-damned crocodile!’

  Seneira had no way of knowing what he’d said, yet she smiled as if she’d expected it all, and again reached into her coat, retrieving a small case covered in a greenish, heavily textured hide. Crocodile hide, as it turned out. ‘You may not remember the beast that attacked us in Dexan Videris’s lair,’ she said to me, ‘but in the Sands we waste nothing, so I had this made as a reminder of your business partner’s daring victory.’

  She handed me the case, which was strikingly beautiful. When I opened the clasp and raised the lid, Reichis nearly lost his mind clambering up my side to grab at its contents.

  ‘My father’s recipe,’ Seneira said. ‘When I told him I was travelling here to pay our respects to the mage sovereign, he insisted I bring some of his butter biscuits just in case.’

  I snapped the lid shut to keep Reichis from devouring them all at once. He groaned in obscene ecstasy as he chewed the one he’d snatched in his paws, then hopped from my shoulder to hers and rubbed his crumb-covered muzzle in her hair. ‘Always liked this girl,’ he purred.

  I didn’t bother reminding him that earlier he couldn’t even remember her name.

  Seneira smiled at him before politely asking, ‘Brave and handsome hunter of the treetops, might I have a minute’s privacy with your … sidekick?’

  Reichis laughed uproariously, repeating her words for my benefit a couple of times before demanding another biscuit and sauntering off to devour it in private.

  Seneira and I walked a little way down the road together. ‘I’m afraid this gift isn’t for you either,’ she said as she handed me a thin blue glass bottle. ‘My father asked me to bring you this. It’s from his private supply of pazione liqueur. However I suspect someone else will end up drinking it.’

  I accepted the bottle gratefully. ‘Hey, having the means to get Reichis passed-out drunk next time he’s irritable is gift enough for me.’

  ‘I have something else as well,’ she said, opening her right hand.

  I looked down to see a tiny pendant attached to a thin silver chain resting on her palm. The pendant was shaped like a tall tower that I recognised as a replica of the Academy of the Seven Sands, its surface a kind of mosaic decorated in the colours of each of the different terrains of the region.

  ‘The students wear these as passes to prove their right to enter the Academy,’ she said. ‘And many continue to wear them throughout their lives as a remembrance of their time there.’ She held the pendant by the chain. ‘May I?’

  I removed my hand and bent down so she could slip it around my neck.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It is a lovely gift.’

  ‘The pendant isn’t the gift, Kellen.’ She hesitated a moment before going on. ‘I saw you when I was speaking at your mother’s funeral. Even before those young mages came over to harass you, you looked so … I don’t even know how to put it.’

  ‘Out of place?’ I suggested.

  She shook her head. ‘I want to say unhomed, though I’m not even sure that’s a word.’

  Yet it perfectly described how I’d felt, and I said as much to her.

  Seneira took my hands in hers. ‘Let this be my gift to you then, Kellen. No matter how far you travel, know that there is always a place for you in the Seven Sands. The Academy offers a dozen different paths to its students. If you grow weary of violence, join us and become a physician. If you tire of breaking things, become a contraptioneer and build instead.’ She grinned up at me. ‘That Gitabrian girl, Cressia – we’ve become close friends these past two years – claims you’re a passable philosopher at times.’

  I reached up to hold the pendant in my hand. Admission to the Academy was exorbitantly expensive and offered only to those who showed outstanding promise, making this a princely gift in more ways than one. Before I could thank her, Seneira stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Remember this one thing always, Kellen: you have friends, and our love for you far outstrips the malice of your enemies.’

  For the life of me I couldn’t think of a reply to the startling depth of her generosity. My rhetorical skills lean towards sarcastic quips, and for once I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut.

  She kissed me on the other cheek before she turned and walked back up the road, leaving me standing there contemplating the dreams of a hundred futures I would never see, feeling nonetheless grateful for all of them.

  29

  The Road

  There’s always a rhythm to the road. Iron-shod hoofs clomping against cobblestones or tromping down dirt trails produce a hypnotising cadence that makes the hours come and go without notice. Days and nights drift by one after another. The repetition of making camp, of unpacking supplies and measuring out what can and can’t be afforded based on how long it’s been since you last bought or hunted food, trudging around in search of wood for a fire, setting up bedrolls only to pack them up again before the sun rises and beginning the process all over again. After a while the scenery before you fades from your thoughts and all you have to mark time with are the memories of what you left behind.

  I kept finding myself staring at the new ember sigil on my forearm. There wasn’t a lot it could do except remind me that I hadn’t said goodbye to my father. No doubt he’d see that as another example of my ongoing disloyalty to our family. Sha’maat would lie and say I’d left her with any number of tearful apologies to convey to him. I hadn’t said goodbye to Torian either, though really, how much could that matter? She’d poisoned me and fed me to the Murmurers – it’s not like she had the high ground when it came to etiquette.

  None of that was what really bothered me though. The problem was my saddle bags.

  ‘No butter biscuits?’ Reichis complained, rifling through the second one. He’d already made a mess of the first.

  ‘Would you quit digging around in there?’ I asked. ‘I told you, you ate all the ones Seneira brought already.’

  He started swearing then, using words so foul I was honestly curious where he’d learned them. Apparently too much time sneaking around court had corrupted his once delicate vocabulary.

  I actually still had a few left, wrapped in cheesecloth and secreted inside the pocket of my coat for a special occasion. I’d hidden them away the night Reichis had demanded a sip of the pazione and promptly grabbed the blue flask out of my hands and run off with it. He’d shown up the next morning with a headache, an empty flask and an improbable story about a coven of bewitching flying rabbits.

  As to the saddlebags? Other than the scourge and dice Emelda had given me, all I had in them was what I’d brought with me to the Daroman court over a year ago. No more, no less. All that time living in the queen’s palace and, other than a few trinkets for Reichis, I hadn’t accumulated a thing. In fact, I’d kept most of my stuff in the saddlebags themselves. Packing had been a matter of stuffing two shirts, two pairs of trousers and a few underclothes into the bags and then walking out the door.

  ‘Told you before, kid,’ Ferius said after I’d mentioned feeling unmoored from that life now, ‘Argosi don’t collect much but dust and scars.’

  Dust and scars.

  I’d certainly acquired my share of both. Not even nineteen, and my body was a patchwork of knife wounds, badly healed burns and the kinds of bizarre-looking patterns of skin discolouration that you can only get from magic. ‘How’s the leg?’ I asked Ferius, reminding myself that she had it worse than I did and yet managed not to complain all the time.

  ‘You know, it don’t feel quite so bad this morning,’ she said, sounding a little surprised. She pounded her fist lightly against her thigh and chuckled. ‘Maybe that cursed malediction’s gotten tired of me and
moved on.’

  ‘Maybe it just doesn’t like the scenery,’ I suggested. ‘Though I doubt maledictions are too particular about such things.’

  There are any number of routes that will take you to Berabesq. The southern trade route is a particularly nice one, fitted with cobblestones, mile markers and the occasional saloon. Ferius had instead chosen to lead us through the patchwork of trails that criss-crossed the most barren terrain in all of the Jan’Tep territories. Nothing to see but dirt and scrub. Worst of all was the wind that came and went in gusts, swirling dust and grit into the air, brewing a pale brown haze that stung the eyes and aggravated the lungs.

  Ferius gave a cough. ‘Reckon you’re right about the …’

  She coughed a second time. Something strained in her voice made me turn around. Her customary grin was gone. The lines on her face, usually so faint as to make her ageless, appeared more pronounced. Her brow was furrowed as if she were trying to remember a joke but the punchline wouldn’t come. I followed her gaze down to the thin trail of blood dripping like a winding creek along her white linen shirt where the head of an arrow protruded from her chest.

  ‘Reckon you’re right about maledictions, kid,’ she said as she fell from her horse.

  30

  The Wound

  ‘Reichis, scatter!’ I said.

  The squirrel cat leaped from our horse, his fur changing colour in mid-air to match the dust and dirt all around us. He wasn’t invisible, but close enough that as he tore off I lost track of him almost immediately.

  I tumbled off my own horse – not because it threw me but because, well, it turns out that’s pretty much the fastest way for me to dismount. I turned the fall into a shoulder roll as best I could and used the momentum to get back on my feet so I could run to where Ferius lay on the ground.

  ‘Where’s your oleus regia?’ I asked, rifling through her saddlebags much the same way as Reichis had done with ours.

  ‘You crazy, kid? Get out of here before you get hit too!’

  I ignored her. She wasn’t thinking this through. A passable archer using a 120-pound pull bow could fire roughly fifteen arrows a minute with decent accuracy. That’s one every four seconds. Since this particular archer had nailed Ferius on a moving horse on the first shot in a windstorm, it was safe to say they were better than passable.

  So why wasn’t there an arrow sticking out of me yet?

  I let my fingers do the searching through Ferius’s saddlebags as I scanned the area, but there was nothing to see other than the winding trail ahead of us, and the patchy scrub and occasional outcropping of rock on either side.

  They could be hiding behind one of those outcroppings, I thought, my fingers still fumbling through the inner pockets of the saddlebag. If so, they’re a lot better at camouflaging themselves than I am at spotting them.

  Finally my fingers found a little round jar made of rough glass. I pulled it out and checked the continents. Oleas regia. Not quite worth its weight in gold, but damned close. I scrambled back to Ferius on my hands and knees.

  A piercing growl cut through the wind. ‘Reichis?’ I called out.

  Stupid. Don’t make him draw attention to his location.

  But the squirrel cat answered back anyway. ‘I’m snared, Kellen. Some kinda lousy skinbag trap.’

  How could there be a snare lying in wait just where Reichis would go?

  Because there’s only a couple of good places to hide around here, I realised then. Which meant whoever’d attacked us knew about Reichis and had known where we’d be. Only that was just about impossible, given how many different roads there are going south from the capital. So they must’ve been following us for days, then once we were on this trail, rode ahead of us and set a trap.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ferius said, looking up at me. ‘It’s somebody who knows us.’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ I said.

  ‘You know talkin’ don’t actually make you die any quicker, right?’

  ‘It does if you keep distracting me.’

  First problem: getting the arrow out. She’d managed to fall on her side, which had kept the shaft from bending and doing further damage inside her. It had struck her high up in the back, a little to the right of dead centre. That meant it hadn’t hit her heart, but might well have pierced a lung.

  Ferius reached up with a hand to the arrowhead. ‘Just give me a second to … get this thing … out.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said, batting her hand out of the way.

  I needed to cut off the arrowhead so I could pull the shaft out the back. The oleus regia would do a decent job of staunching any bleeding and keeping her alive, but it couldn’t do much with the shaft inside her, so I had to take it out without doing further damage. A knife would do it, but I hadn’t sharpened mine and hadn’t found Ferius’s.

  I flipped open my holsters and took a minuscule pinch of each of the powders. ‘I’ll try not to miss,’ I said.

  ‘Mighty courteous of you. They been teachin’ you manners in that big old palace?’

  ‘Not nearly enough,’ I replied, glancing around us once more, trying to pick out where our assailant was hiding, but now I was almost positive there was no one there.

  Ferius wounded, me out of commission trying to save her, and a snare for Reichis to keep from tracking them until it’s too late to catch them.

  The moment the wind died down, I moved Ferius’s arm out of the way so I’d have a clean shot before I tossed the red and black powders in the air, forming the somatic shapes with my hands. Fore and middle fingers aimed at the target for direction, ring and little fingers pressed into my palms in the sign of restraint, and thumbs pointing to the sky, the sign of … Ancestors, please don’t let me kill my friend.

  ‘Carath,’ I intoned.

  The powders ignited on contact, the explosion instantly caught in the channelling force of the spell like a rush of water forced down a narrow tube. A blast of red and black fire shot clean through the shaft just below the arrowhead.

  ‘Nice shot, kid. Hardly felt a thing.’

  I wished that could’ve been true of this next part.

  The instinct, when extracting a long thin piece of wood from someone you care about, is to draw it out as quickly as possible – keep the pain sharp and short. That’s a terrible idea, as I’d learned about a year ago, after a highwayman had shot me through the thigh with a crossbow bolt. The problem is that it doesn’t really want to come out straight, so if you just yank it, you risk tearing something important. In Ferius’s case, there were way too many important things I could damage.

  ‘Slow and steady,’ she said, gritting her teeth in a smile.

  Don’t know why she does that – smile, I mean. Doubt it makes it feel any better. But I guess she takes this Path of the Wild Daisy thing pretty seriously. Joy shines brightest in the darkness, she’d once told me, along with a thousand other nonsense sayings.

  ‘Any time now, kid.’

  I gave one last glance around to make sure no one was creeping towards us. Once I started, I needed to do this all the way.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ I said, and slowly, methodically and excruciatingly painfully, drew the arrow out of her body. Ferius let out a scream that would’ve made the dead rise.

  I tossed the shaft away. It was slick and soaked with her blood.

  ‘Damn, but that don’t get any less painful with practice,’ Ferius said.

  I grabbed for the little jar of oleus regia. ‘This won’t feel much better, I’m afraid.’

  After I’d slathered a small fortune’s worth of ointment over the entry and exit wounds left behind by the arrow and freed Reichis from the snare, I built up a small fire. I spent that night watching over Ferius, convinced with each stuttering rise and fall of her chest that she was about to move no more. Only when her eyes finally fluttered open and a weary, broken smile appeared on her lips did I feel I could breathe again.

  ‘Hey, kid?’ she asked.

  I offered her water, but she shook her head. �
��Yeah, Ferius?’

  ‘I love you somethin’ fierce, but you bring the worst luck with you I ever seen.’

  I let out what could charitably be called an awkward chuckle but sounded more like a sob.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, grabbing hold of my wrist, ‘don’t let guilt make you stupid. You know what this was, right?’

  Yeah, I knew what this was.

  Someone with a bow takes out one of your party with a perfect shot, camouflaged somewhere they’d have to have been waiting for hours to catch you – which meant they knew you were coming – and yet doesn’t kill both right there and then? That’s not brigandry. It’s not even an assassination attempt.

  It was a message.

  Someone didn’t want Ferius Parfax returning to Berabesq.

  31

  The Oath

  The smart thing to do after your mentor’s narrowly avoided being mortally wounded and you now realise someone’s out to get you would be to hole up somewhere safe, bide your time and come up with a brilliant plan to outwit your opponents.

  Ferius, Reichis and I had set out again that morning. Hard as it would be to sneak into Berabesq under our current circumstances, the situation would get a lot worse once their god’s birthday had come and the combined armies of the largest peoples on the continent set out to wage war on every heathen they could find.

  When your luck is as lousy as mine you start wondering if maybe the religious fanatics aren’t quite as crazy as you thought.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked Ferius.

  She didn’t reply at first, just kept her horse trotting along. Her skin had always been pale, but for days now it had been more grey than pink. ‘One hundred and twenty-one,’ she said finally.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-two,’ Reichis chittered from his perch atop our horse’s neck, then rolled onto his back to resume snoring.

  ‘What’d he say?’ Ferius asked.

  ‘He said I’ve only asked two or three times. So, are you okay?’