by Elise Kova
It was enough that he felt different toward her, if only slightly. There was what he might call a new easiness between them. While he had yet to even scratch the surface of understanding the woman, he had somehow managed to take the first steps in that direction—that much he knew for sure.
Meanwhile, her history began to fascinate him more and more. It felt less like a puzzle, or game, and perhaps more accurately, like a long journey. All he needed to have was the patience to walk it.
Though patience was proving difficult at the moment. He’d seated her in front of him, and now all he could focus on was her hips wiggling closer to him with every sway of the mount. Baldair had never been shy about letting a woman know her appeal to him, and he certainly wasn’t going to start now with Raylynn.
She was at least five, perhaps even six or seven years his senior, despite appearances that promised she was within a year of his age. Learning that she’d met the first empress confirmed as much, though he couldn’t discern her age precisely. The infinite possibilities of all Raylynn could have experienced, and experience in, intrigued Baldair. He was good, exceptional even, at slaying maidens. But what would it be like with a more experienced woman? What would it feel like to let someone else lead a little? What would she have to teach him?
The thought put a shiver in him that earned a curious glance from the woman in question. But, as though she could read his mind, she didn’t ask anything. A tiny smile that looked almost like a promise crooked the corner of her mouth.
They continued in silence for the most part, until an odd little encampment sprang from the horizon’s edge. Baldair squinted against the afternoon sun and felt the skin on his face crinkle in a way he wasn’t accustomed to. The sun exposure of the past few weeks would surely wreak havoc on his mien.
“The Nameless City,” Raylynn remarked rather obviously.
“Not much of a city.”
“Urbanity is limited when all it comprises can be moved.” She shifted, straightening in the saddle. “It’s changed locations hundreds of times since the company was formed.”
“How do you continue to find it?” There had been nothing around them for hours, and they’d fled from Yon in complete darkness, striking out in an odd direction.
“The stars.” She pointed upward, reminding him of their conversation when they’d first set out. “The city is always situated underneath a different constellation.”
“You seem to be telling me an awful lot.” He was only partly teasing. “How do you know I’m not going to come out here on my own and learn all your secrets?”
She scoffed at the notion. “I don’t think you could find your way out of your own palace without help.”
“I most certainly can!”
“Only to find the brothel.”
She was trying to get a rise out of him. Baldair was already growing more accustomed to her antics. “Not just the brothel,” he insisted with mock severity. “The brewery, as well.”
Raylynn stared at him for a long moment, giving Baldair enough time to catch her eyes. He gave a wink that set the woman to laughing. Whatever was changing between them, he liked it.
The Nameless City was, as Raylynn had told him, a mobile outpost. However, just because it could be moved didn’t mean its denizens did so very often. The tent structures were staked firmly into the ground. Sand hard-packed to earth as they neared the encampment, no doubt the work of some resident sorcerer with magic Baldair could barely comprehend.
It was an elaborate arrangement. The clang of a blacksmith’s hammer punctuated the air, and, between gaps in the towering canvas and earthen structures, Baldair saw men and women training and tending livestock. Others practiced with various weaponry, but most were lounging in the heat of the midday sun.
There were no markers, no pennons for Empire or old kingdoms, no names even sprawled across any of the curtained entries to the dwellings. The entire place was unmarked and generally unadorned. Simple embellishments here and there—a crude wind chime, a reed-woven mat at the entrance to a domicile—stood out against the sun-bleached sand.
A woman strolled out to greet them. She was advanced in her years but as sturdy as stone. Her expression seemed cut from much the same.
“Raylynn, who do you bring us?” There was a whispering quality to her voice, softer than Baldair expected. It had a melodic note similar to the tone he’d grown familiar with from Raylynn herself.
“A guest, grandmother.”
“Grandmother?” Baldair couldn’t stop himself from thinking aloud. “You didn’t tell me you had family here.”
“Did I owe it to you to say?” Raylynn asked in the manner that was uniquely hers. “It’s not as though I appeared from nowhere. Of course, I have family.”
Baldair kept doubly silent. He had no doubt Raylynn had learned all her manners and skills from her mother and grandmother. If he stood no chance against her, it was a fool’s hope to imagine he could spar with her and her kin—and emerge unscathed.
“Guests are uncommon here, child.” The woman shifted, and Baldair became keenly aware of the sword on her hip. He had no doubt that even at her age, she could muster more than enough strength to knock him around if it came to blows.
“And exceptions have been made for the crown.” Raylynn, with his help, stopped their mount before the woman. Up close, her grandmother looked all the more weathered—by the elements, by life.
“The crown?” The woman’s thick, gray eyebrows arched.
Raylynn hummed in affirmation, dismounting with as little help from Baldair as she could afford. He knew she was proud, and he kept his motions small. He had no doubt the woman saw them, but he would respect Raylynn’s clear wish to manage on her own.
“Grandmother Sophie, this—” Raylynn motioned to him, “is Baldair, our youngest Imperial prince.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Sophie.” Baldair gave a polite nod in the grandmother’s direction.
She snorted. “I doubt that.” The woman was obsessed with his hands a brief moment, looking over them where they still held the reigns of the mount. “You’re far from home in a backwoods place with no comforts to offer you. I don’t think any part of this encounter will be a ‘pleasure,’ prince.”
He laughed. Etiquette and the norm would get him nowhere, he saw. “I think I’ve been properly groomed in advance.” He gave a nod to Raylynn as he dismounted. “At least to be somewhat prepared for this ‘backwoods place,’ as you say.”
The woman exchanged a look with her granddaughter. Raylynn stretched nonchalantly, working out the stiffness in her legs.
“He asked me to serve in his personal guard. I’ve been vetting him,” the golden-haired woman explained to her elder.
“I see.” There was new clarity in the grandmother’s eyes. “As your mother would have wanted.”
Raylynn nodded.
“Well, let’s see you both inside. I’m sure you’re thirsty.” Sophie reached up a hand, patting their horse’s muzzle. “Sure this one is, too. Surprised to see you with a horse, Raylynn.”
“It was a gift,” Raylynn hastily explained, as if horrified by the idea of being associated with a mount.
“Oh?”
“I’ll explain later.” Raylynn shook her head, dismissing the grandmother’s clear assumption that the steed was evidence of Baldair’s generosity. “Do you have any kaha?”
“In the chill box.”
Raylynn’s grandmother led the horse away while Raylynn herself led him into a nearby structure. The base of it was constructed out of stone—no, packed sand? Baldair ran his hand over the surface, rubbing the fine grit that brushed off between his fingers.
“There are Groundbreakers among us.” Raylynn confirmed his suspicions, seeing his inspection. “It’s not easy for them to do, but it helps protect us from any unexpected windstorms.”
Baldair loo
ked up at the canvas ceiling, the sunlight filtering through it and illuminating the wide, open room.
“Trust me, any wall is a good barrier between you and an unexposed storm.” Again, she read his mind about the lack of ceiling. “It’s a compromise. With a stone roof, the building would get very hot; the canvas lets the heat escape.”
She finished her rummaging through a low chest in the back of the room, from which she produced an icy pitcher of the same deep black tea they’d drunk in Yon. Baldair pursed his lips, distinctly remembering the strong, bitter flavor.
“You’ll get used to the taste.” She barely even looked his way, placing the pitcher and two clay cups on a low table in the middle of a pillowed seating area.
“Am I so transparent?” Baldair joined her on the floor.
“You are.” She grinned, as if amused he’d even ask. Baldair rolled his eyes. “It’s not a bad thing, princeling. It’s the people you can’t read that you have to worry about.”
Aldrik instantly came to mind, and Baldair pushed all thought of his brother away. Thoughts of the Crown Prince were the last thing he wanted to have ruin his mood. He accepted the cup of tea from Raylynn, sipping it timidly.
“How do you have ice out here?”
“Waterrunners,” she said as though the fact would be obvious. “First confusion at the buildings, then the ice… You really don’t use much magic in the South, do you?”
Baldair shook his head. “Magic is regarded as dangerous.”
“Why?”
Again, he thought of Aldrik. But instead, Baldair reached around in his mind for an alternate explanation. Why did they fear magic so much?
“It’s just... always been that way.”
Raylynn blinked slowly at him. “You’ve said some truly dumb things, but that’s certainly chief among them.”
He coughed into his cup, drinking too much of the bitter tea at once.
“Just because it’s the way it’s always been doesn’t mean it should be accepted.” Raylynn mistook his coughing for surprise.
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I do,” he insisted. “It got worse after the War of the Crystal Caverns.”
Raylynn paused. If he wasn’t so familiar with the woman, he would’ve missed the moment’s hesitation. But it was there—a fraction of stillness mid-movement, a distance in her eyes that she snapped back from like an archer’s bowstring.
“I’d imagine so.” Raylynn put her cup on the table as though nothing happened. “It was almost convenient, how the war happened right after Mhashan fell... gave us all a common enemy to fight as one.”
“You can’t possibly think the Empire had—”
She waved the idea away before he could finish it. “Your Father may be a tactical genius and a relentless warrior to the point of being conquest-hungry, but he’s certainly not stupid.” Baldair didn’t know how he felt about the assessment of his father, so he said nothing and resolved to take no offense. “And tampering with the caverns? That’s just stupid.”
Before Baldair could comment further, Raylynn’s grandmother returned.
“That’s quite the stallion you were gifted.” Sophie walked over to where they sat, helping herself to a cup Raylynn had poured by the time she joined them. “Old breeding practices—you can tell in his height and bones.”
“It was from Princess Fiera.” Baldair had never met someone who could insist so boldly that they had received a boon from the dead. But Raylynn continued to do so.
Raylynn’s grandmother sat, contemplating this for a long moment. She didn’t dismiss the notion; she didn’t look agape in disbelief. She merely considered it, weighing the truth of Raylynn’s words with her unwavering stare.
“The princess?”
“Yes.” Raylynn seemed to be bracing herself. “A gift of the Mother, a gift of fate.”
“It’s been as she foretold, hasn’t it?”
Baldair suddenly felt like he had been missing out on something the entire time as he realized both women had focused their attention on him. He didn’t like the feeling of Raylynn’s grandmother’s gaze on him; she had the same dark eyes as Aldrik. So he looked to Raylynn instead. The depth of her gaze was no softer, but it was familiar.
He watched her fill with a deep breath. “I haven’t been completely honest with you, princeling. Yes, my mother told me of the crown. Yes, I followed in her footsteps and learned from her to heed the crown. But we—you and I—we were destined to meet.”
Under normal circumstances, Baldair would jump at the opportunities presented by a beautiful woman telling him she was destined to meet him. But Raylynn wasn’t like most beautiful women, and he found his tongue heavy, his cleverness forgotten.
14. Raylynn
She felt the weight of her grandmother’s stare more keenly than the prince’s confusion. Raylynn suspected the prince was confused often, and she was contented with letting him be. It had served her just fine for weeks.
“What?” he asked dumbly.
Raylynn willfully ignored him, giving a small nod toward her grandmother. “She foretold it all herself when she looked into the flames.”
In the sixty or so years her grandmother had walked the earth, she had likely seen many a strange and fantastic thing, especially as a woman of the Waste. And because her grandmother was born and bred in the West, she had never asked if the princess’s divination had proved true; when a Firebearer peered along the Mother’s lines of fate, it was a contract among the Firebearer, the Mother, and the person whose future was being told. Inserting yourself into that contract by even asking what had been said was a great affront to the Goddess’s kindness.
Her grandmother settled back on the pillows, shifting to accommodate her sword as though it were another limb. “Very well, then.”
“What was foretold?” Where her grandmother was graceful and sharp, the prince was unknowing and blunted. Raylynn prickled briefly at the mere suggestion that she share what had been read in the flames for her—however much it might have to do with the prince.
Her grandmother gave her a certain look that told Raylynn, I’ll cut him down to size if you want. Raylynn couldn’t help but give a small laugh. She was flush with appreciation for the way doing so eased her tension.
“I suppose it’s been secret long enough.” She sighed softly.
The elder woman stood, setting down her empty cup like a period on an unspoken thought. “I have things to tend to.”
“You most certainly do not.” Raylynn snorted. Everyone in the Nameless company cared for themselves and only for themselves unless otherwise asked. Self-sufficiency was key to living in the Waste, and it was taught from a young age to all would-be mercenaries. Her grandmother had always taken care of her own matters well before the sun rose each morning.
“This is a conversation not meant for my ears.”
Raylynn wanted to insist otherwise, but she stayed quiet; it was true enough, what Sophie said.
“You know where I’ll be if you need me.”
Sparring, Raylynn finished mentally. “Thank you.”
Her grandmother nodded. Raylynn had no doubt that Baldair would perceive the relationship as distanced and cold. So his words the moment her grandmother had left surprised her.
“You two are close.”
“Why do you say that?”
He shrugged, clearly not entirely sure himself. “Can just feel it.”
Raylynn remembered what he had said previously about his elder brother. Perhaps the prince was more perceptive to the true emotions behind people’s odd mannerisms than even he realized. He certainly had beyond-average intuition. If his ears couldn’t hear the song of the sword, there had to be some other explanation for his skill with a blade.
For once, the prince was quiet, sipping his kaha and inspecting the brightly colored Wes
tern fabrics that encased the pillows beneath them. He didn’t seem awkward, merely curious. It was the closest to royalty she’d seen him look, and Raylynn mentally remarked how it was about time for him to get his act together.
“When I was a girl,” she began finally, “my mother took me to see the princess.”
Baldair nodded.
“Fiera was a Firebearer—no doubt the source of your brother’s fiery inheritance.” Raylynn rested back on her palms, tipping her face skyward. She watched the western winds ripple the canvas of the roof, its quiet, familiar flapping a comfort. “Since you seem to know nothing of the West, I’ll assume you don’t know of curiosity shops.”
“I’ve heard of them.” He surprised her. “They’re for fortune telling, right?”
“They are,” she affirmed. “Some Firebearers have the ability to look into the flames. It connects them to the fire of the Mother that burns in the sun above us. It gives them the power to see along the red lines of fate She designs, and which we all walk.
“Going to a curiosity shop is almost a right of passage for a Westerner. It’s a blessing of the Mother we take seriously, and most children are brought to a Firebearer some time before their tenth birthday.”
“The Princess Fiera was that Firebearer for you?” Baldair noted.
“She was, and it was an extremely high honor.”
“Your mother and the princess must have been close.”
Raylynn paused, mulling over the idea of her mother, the few memories she had of her and the princess together. Them laughing, sparring, verbally brawling like surly barmen over a glass of burning alcohol.
“They were,” she said finally. “I was young to have my future read, but Fiera was pleased to oblige my mother. I selected my items to burn—liquor, dried leaves, and cotton—and waited, not knowing what would come next.