Isaac could feel their eyes upon him, expectant, judgmental. Now was his moment to cement himself as an integral part of the group. Now was his moment to impress them, as they had all undoubtedly impressed each other.
“Blessed.”
Slate leaned forward. “What?”
“Blessed,” said Isaac, slightly louder.
“Thought you guys were nearly extinct?” Crymson phrased the question more like an accusation.
Isaac felt the chair dig deeper into his spine. “Some of us are still around.”
“What kind of Blessed? What can you do?” Slate asked.
“I’d rather not . . . ”
A bubble of silence again enveloped the group. Isaac squirmed, but didn’t say anything, refusing to look up from the middle of the table.
“Terrific. Absolutely terrific.” Slate slapped his hand against the table. “I’ve got a group of misfits on my hands, and the biggest one of them all is practically mute. Do we at least have a plan?”
“Considering you brought along a real mute, I’d consider ourselves lucky that he managed to say a few words,” Alocar said.
A narrowing of Slate’s eyes. “You better watch what comes out of your wizened fucking mouth, Old Man.”
“I have the rudiments of a plan, not that you did a thing to help besides bitch.” Alocar reached behind his back and pulled out a long canister, capped on both ends. He popped the bottom and caught a sheet that fell from the cylinder’s hollow. A quick wipe across the table with his shirt sleeve and he unfurled the paper, a map at its center.
Alocar spoke in a normal voice, causing Isaac’s eyes to dart around the room. “The royal family is here.” He pointed to the capital city of Tabernack, east of the Idranian River. “We, on the other hand, are here.” His finger landed on Dradenhurst. “The good news is Tabernack is only about a two month ride at most, and we can stay on the King’s Road the entire time. It’ll take us right through a few villages and a couple bigger cities, like Fayne, so the trip itself won’t be bad, which will put us back in Dradenhurst by about mid-September, if everything goes as planned. We just need to get some horses and supplies and we should be gone in three weeks, after the Idranian has calmed enough to cross. Questions?”
The table rocked as another person slid a chair up to its edge. A man with eyes the color of wet dirt stared at them. He smelled like a prisoner from Whispers, though more amply fed than three put together.
“And who might you be?” Crymson’s hand had drifted below the table, next to her right thigh.
The man had a high voice, a boy’s right before the onset of puberty. “I’m a messenger. Angras sent me. You leave in two weeks.”
“The floodwaters won’t have receded by then,” Alocar said. “It’s impossible.
“Then make it possible. Horses and supplies are being gathered as we speak. They’ll be in front of the Ruganel at seven in the morning, two weeks from now.” The man let his dirt-brown eyes wander over them, one corner of his mouth upturned. “Remember, you serve only at the pleasure of the master.”
A knife nailed the man’s hand to the table, eliciting a squeal. Slate leaned forward and wriggled the knife around, blood dripping into the divots created by Teacher’s fingernails. “I serve no man, and he best do well to remember that. As soon as these royal nobodies are finished, he better give me the antidote and be on his way, because if I see him again, death will be the least of his worries.”
He pulled the knife from the man’s hand and made a shooing motion. The man, his wounded hand cradled in his other, stumbled out the door, blood spots marking his path.
“Sounds like Angras is on a tight schedule,” Crymson said. “We might be able to take advantage of that.”
Alocar nodded. “Are we in agreement for three weeks, Friday? And we should meet again in between then and now, next week. Say, Wednesday, here, same time?
“Make it Thursday,” said Slate, “and I’ll consider it, if only to piss off that masked motherfucker.”
Isaac smiled, but bowed his head so that it remained unseen. Confidence, he might not have. Gumption, he might lack. But this task he understood. They had fletched the arrow and pointed it. The only thing left was to hit the target. Snap. If his weapon didn’t kill him first.
Rupert
He followed the fat messenger down three streets, and then, when he attempted to cross to the little drug den operating on the corner of Cullens, dragged him into an alley and threw him against the wall.
A squeak and the fat man slapped at Rupert’s face, leaving bloody fingerprints trailing across Rupert’s cheekbones like war paint applied by a blind woman. Two strikes to the fat man’s midsection and the slapping stopped, his gasping alongside it. Rupert put his knife between the folds of the fat man’s neck, blood welling until it ran down Rupert’s hand and arm unabated.
“Answer my questions and I’ll see about letting you go. Got it?”
“What do you want? I was just walking to – ”
Rupert pushed the knife up, forcing the fat man onto his tiptoes. “Questions, I said.”
“Yes yes, okay – ask!”
“At Brewmaster’s, you were talking to an older man: white hair, thick beard. What did you tell him?”
“Him? Nothing. Just some old friends, meeting for drinks.”
Rupert stabbed the fat man in his shoulder and twisted, using his other hand to cover the fat man’s moans. Checked the street. Nothing. A second stab. “Don’t lie to me! I saw what they did to you. Now, repeat after me: I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
“I can’t – you don’t understand, he’ll – I – he’ll kill me!”
Rupert moved the knife to the fat man’s groin and slowly began to press, saying, “Repeat after me: I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
A sob escaped the fat man’s lips. “I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
Angras
Fifteen years ago
An army of miniature water demons made shiver their victims, roofs their only natural enemies. They pounded against my head, each heavier than the last, until I felt that I might fall to my knees, a waterlogged corpse at the bottom of a river of mud.
“What did she steal!” Rain slapped against the guard’s face. He looked like a warrior from my storybooks, though whether he was the hero or the villain, I didn’t know. I hoped he was the hero.
There is no such thing. I ignored Angras. He wasn’t being very nice these days.
“I won’t ask you again,” said the guard. “What did she steal from their Royal Majesties?”
The woman muttered something.
“Speak up!”
“The girl didn’t steal nothing.” She pushed her crying daughter behind her. “I was the one.”
The King rubbed his temples where the golden circlet rested. “The penalty for thievery is the loss of a limb, but because a child is at fault I will allow –”
To his right, the Queen stood and whispered in his ear. He frowned and whispered back, but she shook her head. He looked at the girl and then back to the Queen, who nodded.
“The penalty for thievery is the loss of a limb.” The King straightened. “Thomas?”
The woman screamed as the guard forced her daughter’s hand open on the vegetable vendor’s counter. She tried to intervene, but the guard backhanded her to the ground.
Let me out.
I obeyed, and blackness fell over the world. I felt lighter, almost insubstantial, and the rain had stopped. Even the mud around my ankles had disappeared. Somebody screamed, and then the blackness retreated and I again felt the punishing deluge.
Hero or villain, they all pass from this world much the same. Angras felt oddly satisfied, almost sated. It told you I could help you. I can always help you.
Tabernack:
“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Denis Diderot
Queen Melanie
> Dammit, but she was late. Her steps kicked the dress up around well-defined calves, its color that of grass in the fullness of spring. Strange how much the small things changed. Melanie remembered the dresses in vogue at her coronation. Tailored with drawn-out trains, low-hanging sleeves that carried well past the wrist, and sweltering amounts of material covering the neck, the style’s death knell had tolled when she had married into royalty. Soon, the dresses that flattered her had become the style that suited all women, like it or not: tight sleeves, if there were any at all, and necks left bare, so that jewelers rejoiced throughout Prolifia, their shops flooded with imperious demands for extravagant necklaces designed to cover the suddenly blush-worthy space between cleavage and chin. And trains, ha! Thank God those were gone.
Dainty prints trailed her in the garden’s soft soil. The worries of a queen’s life were evident in the form of crow’s feet beside her amber eyes, though the rest of her skin remained smooth. Thankfully, she’d inherited her mother’s slim hips and her father’s metabolism, so though she still enjoyed a womanly figure, she’d been spared the weight gain that so often accompanied middle age.
The palace gardens became more colorful, changing from the leafy green of shrubbery and small trees to the cool colors of Bachelor Buttons, Forget-Me-Nots, and Honeywort, the better to embrace the coming fall’s blustery landscape. To her right was a manmade pond, its edges lined in wood painted cobalt, lilies floating on its mossy surface and small, bright fish swimming beneath the water, breeding at an alarming rate now that her gardeners had captured the world’s peskiest turtle.
Melanie rubbed a speck of red from the tip of one rounded fingernail as she stepped onto the stone path leading to the garden’s center. It wouldn’t do to let her morning’s exploits ruin lunch.
Rupert scratched the back of his neck, wincing as he peeled off chunks of dead skin. Ahead, one of the Queen’s Guard – Talliver – set a brisk pace that forced Rupert into a crablike scuttle, avoiding scraping together the raw flesh of his chafed inner thighs.
They passed room after room, each adorned richly enough to satisfy the most overindulged noble, fireplaces cold and grey in the late summer. Between each of the rooms were man-sized, single-pane glass windows, allowing view of the castle’s courtyard, where even at this early hour a small group of nobles were trying their hands at archery. Rupert popped his jaw, looking out at immense clouds, so many that the sky looked white with patches of blue.
They swept past two guards posted at a corner badly in need of a broom and entered a long hallway, double doors at its end and nothing but blank wall in between. Their heels clicked on the stone floor, loud in the hall’s vastness.
Talliver stopped at the hall’s halfway point. He looked at the double doors and then back to the guards at the corner, who kept their eyes locked resolutely in the other direction. Putting both hands to the wall, Talliver pushed, and a cleverly blended door opened.
The room was of middling size, a small, intricately carved glass table in its center and thick tomes cramming wooden shelves from ceiling to floor. Queen Melanie sat behind the table, a mailed guard on either side. Rupert took a knee, head bowed.
“Thirty years on my payroll, and you are just now bringing news?”
“Yes, my Queen.” He tried coming to grips with what he was about to say.
“Well?”
“General Alocar Leyton is on the move.”
Melanie narrowed her eyes, leaning forward. “That is retired General Alocar Leyton, Rupert.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Somebody – a man named Angras – has taken Alocar’s family hostage, refusing to allow them to live unless Alocar does something for him. This same man, he’s done similar things to a few others, creating a group, and he’s instructed them to . . .” Rupert blanched.
“Speak.”
“Alocar has been instructed to kill you, along with the rest of your family.”
Melanie laughed, throwing a hand out to the side. “Kill me? Best of luck. He will die before he sets foot anywhere near here, let alone my husband or son. More importantly, you are sure this man’s name was Angras?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“When did they leave?”
“He said Friday, so two days ago. I changed horses every fifty miles to make it here in time.”
“Their path?” Melanie snapped a finger at one of her guards, who took a pin from a side table and moved to a map on the far wall.
“The King’s Road, I believe, Your Majesty.”
“Good. We can cut them off at Hammonfall, if we play our cards right. Did he mention any plans? Companions? A timetable?”
“Did you tell any of your coming here?” she asked, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“Nobody, My Queen. Alocar thinks I’m with Elean – pardon me, my wife – vacationing , and my wife thinks I’m on business.”
“Very good. Talliver?”
Behind Rupert, the guard stepped forward.
The Queen waved a hand. “Please.”
Rupert again found himself on his knees, his hands held behind his back. He struggled and almost managed to get up, but the other two guards joined. The Queen walked in front of him and accepted a knife from Talliver. She drew it across Rupert’s throat and an effervescent spray of red darkened the sleeve of her lilac dress.
The Queen looked at her sleeve and sighed. “Ruined.” She made no attempt to sidestep the growing pool of blood, dragging the hem of her dress through it on the way to her chair.
“The usual, Your Majesty?” asked Talliver, following her.
“Actually, send extra to the wife. A quarter more. Thirty years of loyalty deserves a reward.”
She regretted the loss of an asset, but if Prolifia’s survival rested on one spy’s ability to keep his mouth shut, then six feet under was still too shallow. She rubbed clean another spot of blood. Melanie knew that Rupert’s face would visit her dreams tonight, but how could she ask others to kill if she wasn’t ready to do it herself?
Angras. Just the name made Melanie’s temper flare. The figure had been around for the last three years, stirring up mischief, trying to get the common man to think for himself, but thus far his efforts had failed, mostly due to Prolifia’s powerful economy; nobody thinks about change when things are going well. But in the last year, several of Prolifia’s minor problems had escalated to major issues, and Angras had been quick to take advantage.
Melanie’s network had arrested the figure on multiple occasions, only to rip off the mask and find that Angras had tricked them. Wherever he struck, Angras loosed duplicates of himself to elude his quarries. Dressed in identical clothes but with alternate masks, these phantoms let others see them near points of conflict; however, when captured, they knew nothing more than what they’d been told: “Here’s a mask and some money. Be here and I’ll make it worth your while.”
With nothing physical to go by and the grumblings of the middle and lower classes more serious by the day, the network had worked itself into the ground, and Melanie felt the brunt of it. To that end, they’d settled for a wait-and-watch scenario. It might do harm in the short-term, but it seemed to be their only method of eventually securing Angras.
Laughter sounded ahead. A smile lit her face, deepening the crow’s feet, though Olen would tell her that they only added to her luster. The thought broadened her smile.
The meadow revealed itself. The bright foliage around her decreased, and then the path ended, replaced by a thick carpet of grass. Cozy, the plants around the meadow towered six feet over her head, dense and thorny. One would be hard pressed to find a more private area in the entire kingdom.
The middle of the meadow sported a circular stone table, its top sanded smooth. Four stone chairs, long enough to qualify as small couches, surrounded it, cushioned for the occasion. Melanie inhaled the scent of freshly baked bread and peppered venison, complete with juicy wild onions that garlanded the platter’s sides.
Two figures occupied an eq
ual amount of chairs, each arguing with waved hands and rapidly alternating facial expressions. Never the most robust of men, easy living had given her husband’s thin body a slight pooch, but as though to balance the scales, nature had allowed him to keep his full head of hair, still a thicket even as he approached fifty.
As she walked unnoticed to the table, Melanie took the time to admire her son’s features: a shade over six feet, with straight black hair that he’d inherited from his grandfather, jaw a touch too strong but blue eyes that made the flaw nearly unnoticeable – he was, to the last drop, a son of whom to be proud.
“Mother!” Their embrace was tight. His height made her feel small, and she blinked back tears. Never had she thought the day would come.
She gave Olen a peck on his cheek, which was slightly more drawn than she liked – probably the problems from the borders – but she didn’t look her best either, so she brushed it aside and turned to Remson.
“So what brings you back home so suddenly?”
“Well,” said Remson as he reached across the table and grabbed a small loaf of bread, “I missed everybody dearly, so I thought I’d drop by and give you my love.”
Melanie rolled her eyes. Olen looked from one to the other before he grabbed a roll and stuck a piece of venison inside. He took a bite, eyes on Melanie.
“How kind of you,” she said, “but now that you are here and you see your dear mother and father are still alive and kicking, what other reasons have you to visit?
“You wound me. I only wanted to see the two of you. Don’t you believe my love?” Remson smiled in what he probably thought was a charming manner. “How goes the kingdom in my absence? Am I going to need to take over any time soon?”
Olen swallowed a bite and said, “Not too soon, I hope, but the time is drawing near where you need to return home for good. You still have much to learn in the ways of running a kingdom.”
“I know, I know. But I’m out there doing stuff! Haven’t you given me things to do to help the kingdom while I’ve been away?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but continued, “And I’ve done all of those things. The merchants in Slideleese, that riot in New Mansvern. I mean, I’m not just running around the countryside in a drunken haze. I’m more of a help out there than I could ever be in here. The kingdom needs you two, not me.”
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