The Fanged Crown

by Jenna Helland

  “It’s not human,” Verran blurted out. Then he looked as if he wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “What are you, a dog?” Boult asked incredulously. “How do you do that?”

  “Down, Boult,” Harp said easily. “Identifying corpses by smell could be a useful skill.”

  “What? Knitting is a useful skill. Cooperage, definitely handy. No offense, Verran, but that’s just …”

  “Boult, enough.” But Verran had already moved away into the gloom. “It’s not his fault,” Harp whispered angrily.

  Boult jutted out his jaw unapologetically. “Maybe not, but it’s still unsettling.”

  “Fine. Be unsettled in the privacy of your thick skull. He’s just a kid. I’m sure he didn’t ask to be that way.”

  “Oh, it’s just a family trait? Like curly hair?” Boult hissed.

  Harp shrugged noncommittally. “Well, in a way.”

  “In what way?” Boult demanded.

  “His father was a warlock,” Harp said softly, watching as Verran inspected a row of shelves at the far end of the room. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  “If his father made a bargain with something dark, then he would get the power, not his son,” Boult informed Harp.

  “Unless giving power to Verran was part of the bargain,” Harp replied, suddenly feeling uneasy. He’d hadn’t had a chance to ponder his conversation with Verran on the beach or consider the implications of what Verran had told Harp about his father.

  “Maybe,” Boult said. “Or maybe Verran’s making all that up. Maybe he’s the one who asked for the bargain. Maybe he made up the story about his father.”

  “And maybe this is all speculation,” Harp said. “It could be … something else entirely.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Boult replied as Verran called to them from across the dusty room. He was standing near a low table that was still set with empty wooden bowls and cups filled with water. A rotting haunch of meat hung over a cold pile of ash in the fire pit.

  “Dinner ended abruptly,” Boult said. “I wonder what happened at lovely Cardewton? Did Avalor tell you what its lovely leader reported, Harp?”

  “No, and I’m sure whatever Cardew said at court bears little resemblance to the truth.”

  “But Liel knows,” Boult said gruffly.

  “And we’ll ask her. But be patient,” Harp said. “Let her get some clothes, clean the blood off herself. She’s not going anywhere.”

  “Patience is an excuse for the dull-witted,” Boult retorted.

  Harp opened his mouth to reply, but changed his mind. Between Liel and Verran, he had too much on his mind to banter with Boult. Having found Liel, he wasn’t sure what to do next. If there were more hints to Cardew’s plans here, Avalor would want to know what they were. But Avalor would also want his daughter safe in the Wealdath. Usually he could count on Boult for solid advice, but after Boult’s revelation about Cardew, he wasn’t sure the dwarf was thinking clearly either.

  They headed to the door at the west end of the building, which opened onto a scrubby patch of ground. Nearby was a small shack with a padlock on the door, and there was another cluster of lean-tos near the outer wall. While Verran wandered over to check out the huts, Harp slammed his boot against the door of the shack. The entire frame splintered as the door went flying back and clattered against a weapons cabinet, knocking several swords to the dirt.

  “Why even bother with a lock?” Harp said, looking at the splintered remains of the door.

  The men replenished their bolts, and Harp checked the small selection of swords, most of which were rusted or slightly bent. There was only one that looked promising—a long sword with a golden hilt. An engraved serpent curled around the blade, and there was an empty space on each side of the pommel where jewels had been removed.

  “Feel better?” Boult asked as Harp hefted the sword in his hand, sizing up the length and weight of the weapon.

  “Isn’t having a sword always better than not having a sword?” Harp asked.

  “It depends on your definition of having.”

  Harp recognized a warning in Boult’s tone. “Do you have something you want to say?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then just get it off your chest, dwarf.”

  “I have doubts that Cardew could mastermind anything as complex as an omelet, let alone run such an operation in Chult from his precious little estate in Tethyr.”

  Harp was genuinely surprised. “We know what Cardew is capable of. Why would such a thing be beyond him?”

  “He’s capable of lying. He’s capable of having someone else do his dirty work. He’s capable of taking orders. That’s what we know.”

  “You don’t think he organized the Children’s Massacre?”

  Boult snorted. “No, I’ve never thought that.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “I have my theories.”

  Harp gestured impatiently. “The skillet’s not getting any hotter, Boult. Throw on the butter and go.”

  “All right, but you won’t like it.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Remember I told you about the attack on the road outside the Winter Palace. Well, here’s what I didn’t tell you: the assassins were elves.”

  “Elves? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Not if the Branch of Linden set up the attack. But there’s others—”

  “The elves in Tethyr are solidly behind Avalor. He’s had their allegiance for years. Are you implying that Avalor—”

  Someone tapped lightly on the doorframe, and they both jumped.

  Kitto cleared his throat, “Liel wants to talk to you,” he said.

  A late afternoon rainstorm forced them to take shelter inside the small hut that Liel had shared with her husband. The mud-and-straw walls were intact, but there were gaps between the floorboards and holes in the roof where the rain came through. Birds had nested in the thatch; they twittered and rustled as the wind lashed against the hut.

  Before the storm came, Kitto had boiled a pot of water over the open fire pit outside. They sat on logs set around the fire by the colonists and drank tepid tea in mugs that Verran had found in the common building. With their packs pushed up against the driest wall, they sat on the floor and waited for Liel to speak. A crack of lightning crashed into the jungle nearby, but she didn’t seem to hear it. She passed the cup from one hand to the next, staring intently into it.

  “Things had been wrong with Cardew and me for a while. He spent all his time at Anais’s court, maneuvering for position and playing the political games he loved so much. I left him and went back to living at my father’s house in the Wealdath. After several months, Cardew came to me full of apologies. He had news of a venture in Chult, a venture that Queen Anais had handpicked for him. He was so excited, and it sounded like the perfect chance for us to do something together, to build something up—away from the intrigue of the queen’s court.

  “Cardew told me that we were going to Chult with a large contingent of adventurers and their families. But when we arrived in the jungle, it was just me, Cardew, and a handful of men and half-orcs. They were mercenaries hired from Baldur’s Gate, and as soon as I saw them, I knew they weren’t planning to make a home. We sailed to Chult in two different ships—Cardew and I on one ship, and the mercenaries on another. I first saw the men while we were standing on the beach as the ship sailed away. And I knew that Cardew had lied to me about what was going on in Chult.

  “Minutes after we landed, a man was bit by a sand scorpion and died there on the beach. Another was almost killed by something ten feet into the jungle. I thought about leaving them and trying to find my way to Nyranzaru, but I wasn’t even sure which direction to go. And I still had hopes that Cardew hadn’t lied to me intentionally.

  “The next day one of the half-orcs drank water from a muddy stream and began choking. I tried to help him, but he suffocated on his own tongue. I don’t know where Cardew got the coin to pay th
e mercenaries’ fees, but it must have been extensive. Nothing deterred them, not even after the first night when something came into the camp and dragged away another man.

  “Cardew had a map that he consulted obsessively and wouldn’t let anyone else see. I glanced at it once when he was sleeping. It was a map of the isle, and there were a series of sites that he’d marked, maybe eleven or twelve in all, all around the area. They were the hidden ruins that he’d come to search, but I didn’t know it until later. There was something in the ruins that Cardew was determined to find, and he spent his days with a select group of men systematically searching the jungle.

  “But that was harder than he expected. The jungle likes her secrets, and most days they simply wandered in the wilderness with nothing to show but rashes and scratches. Cardew hardly spoke to me, just gave me orders for what I was supposed to have the men do the next day. Each morning when I woke up he was gone, and he would arrive back just as the sun was setting. You have to understand, there was nowhere for me to go. There were no ships, there was no contact with outsiders, and to be honest, I wanted to know what he was up to.

  “One day I followed them to the ruins on the north end of the valley beyond the waterfall. I guess one of the guards told Cardew that I had left the colony, because after that, he kept a guard with me at all times. It was unbearable. Then one day he arrived back to the camp early and called me into the house. He said that he had found something very important and showed me a parchment with a spell for opening a portal. He told me to make the portal and have it ready for us to go through the next day.

  “But I was unwilling to do the magic. The spell had been translated into Common, but it was obviously something very old and powerful, perhaps something that he had found in the ruins. I decided that the portal was the reason he had brought me down to Chult in the first place. I was supposed to open it for him. But I’d seen enough to know that once I did it, I would have served my purpose and would no longer be useful to him. I was afraid what would happen to me if I complied.

  “The next day Cardew arrived back at the camp bloody and alone. When I told him I hadn’t finished the spell, he went into a rage. In our years as husband and wife, he had never laid his hands on me, but he hit me so hard I blacked out. When I woke up, he was gone.

  “I’ve been here ever since, trying to figure out what he was doing and find a way home. The machine you saw must have been part of his plan. I was intent on destroying it, and that’s when you found me.”

  Liel seemed exhausted after she told her story, and by an unspoken understanding, none of the men pressed her for more information. The rain stopped, and Harp fell asleep listening to a steady wind rustling the leaves. A few hours later, Harp heard Liel stir, pad softly across the floor of the hut, and go outside.

  “Can I join you?” he asked, pulling the door shut behind them so the others wouldn’t be disturbed by their voices. He laid his cloak over her shoulders.

  “Of course.” She pulled the cloak close around her body as if she had been cold. “I changed my mind about Tethyr. I want to go back.”

  “To Darromar and the court?” Harp asked in surprise.

  “No, to the Wealdath,” she explained. “I want to see the forest.”

  So some things had changed, Harp thought. The Liel he’d known would never have described the Wealdath as part of Tethyr. But it was to be expected that marrying a statesman and being in the Court of the Crimson Leaf would have changed the way she saw the world.

  “What about Cardew?” Harp asked.

  “Let him do what he will,” she said softly. “Who am I to stop him?”

  Harp watched her profile as she talked. Her face was tipped up to the clear, dark sky where the space between the stars looked more deep blue than pure black. Liel hadn’t aged a day, which was not surprising considering her elf blood. She was beautiful to him in a way no one else had ever been, and he found something beautiful in most women.

  He wanted to reach out and touch her jaw, to brush his fingers along the delicate vine-and-leaf pattern the way he had so many times before. Instead, he asked her the question he’d been waiting to ask for years.

  “Why did you tell Cardew about us?” he asked.

  “I didn’t tell him. He just knew.”

  Harp wasn’t sure what to say to that. He’d long forgiven Liel for telling Cardew about their relationship. She couldn’t have known how Cardew would retaliate against his rival. But the news that Liel had never told their secret to Cardew at all was a surprise. Harp wanted to believe her, but he wasn’t sure that he did.

  “Did you know where they sent me?”

  “No, I didn’t. When I left the Wealdath, my father promised to find you and free you, wherever you were. Months later, he wrote to me and told me it was done. I asked where you were, but he never told me.”

  “Were you happy with Cardew?” Harp asked. “In the beginning at least?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “But it didn’t last long.”

  “It never does,” Harp agreed. Liel shifted beside him, and he sensed a change in her body, like an animal that glimpsed a predator and was preparing to flee.

  “How could you turn yourself in like that?” she demanded suddenly. “You knew you would go to prison. You knew you would lose Kitto and me.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” Harp said. “They were attacking elves indiscriminately, just for hiding us. They were using me as an excuse for the violence.”

  “Why didn’t you just run away? Disappear into the North or go inland with Kitto? Once you’d got far enough, they never would have found you.”

  “But they might have found you,” Harp said.

  “Stop it,” Liel said abruptly. “You’re lying to me now, just the way you did then.”

  “I never lied to you.” Harp’s head was beginning to ache, and his brain felt sluggish.

  “It was all a lie. From the very beginning. You used me.”

  Harp took a deep breath, unsure of why the conversation had suddenly veered in the direction it had. “I’ve wanted to apologize for something for a long time. I shouldn’t have said that you were marrying Cardew for power and influence. I knew you better than that. I wasn’t careful with my words. But I never lied to you.”

  Liel was quiet for a moment. “That was the breaking point?”

  “Wasn’t it?” Harp was shocked at the lack of emotion behind Liel’s question. It had been the moment that had snapped them in two, the thing that had felt irreversible. It was as if he had triggered her memory, but none of the emotion about the argument itself.

  “I guess it was,” she finally said. “I remember.”

  “I never forgot,” he said, disconcerted by her nonchalant manner.

  “After we left the Marderward with Kitto, we were in that little boat for two days before we got to Gwynneth Isle,” she continued. “And you were barely conscious. I’m not sure how we managed to get all the way to the island.”

  Between the lashes and Predeau’s beating, Harp had been in bad shape when they left the Marderward. By the second day aboard the little skiff, he’d developed a high fever, and his wounds were inflamed with an infection that Liel couldn’t heal. Those days were a blur for him. He remembered being frantic to keep Kitto and Liel near him, as if he would lose them forever if they were separated for even an instant. When they reached the safe haven, their host mistook Liel and Kitto as his wife and son.

  Liel stared at the sky again. “What happened, Harp? You were there, and then, just like that, you weren’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were close. And then you just retreated from me.”

  “We talked about it being over from the moment it started,” Harp reminded her. “I wasn’t sure how you felt.”

  “You should have talked to me. You should have told me that you felt like what we were doing was wrong. But the fact that I wasn’t even worth it to you …”

  Harp started to speak, but she continued
.

  “… It can only mean you never had any regard for me in the first place.”

  “That isn’t true,” Harp protested.

  “Isn’t it? It wasn’t ever about anything but your convenience. Do you know what that makes me? Your whore.”

  “I’m not sure what to say,” Harp said, managing to keep his voice steady despite the shock that she remembered their relationship in such a way. “You wanted it to be uncomplicated. You knew you were going back to Cardew.”

  “But it became something we didn’t intend. You should’ve made an effort, not just left me without an explanation.”

  “I should have done a lot of things.”

  “I hated you. No, it was something different. I regretted ever knowing you. I wished that it had never happened.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” Harp assured her. “That was never my intention.”

  “But you did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s easy to apologize. Those are just words.”

  Harp had a sense of vertigo as if he were sliding down a steep slope, and there was nothing to grab onto and stop himself. He felt exhausted and had no idea how to make things right.

  “I didn’t think you loved me, Liel. You never said you did.”

  “Why love someone you’re never going to be with?” Liel said bitterly.

  “If it means anything, you stayed in my head in a way I never expected.”

  “You were in prison. Holding onto a fantasy is expected.”

  “It was more than that,” Harp said. “Even after prison. In life, I think you only get a few people who stay in your heart, whether you want them to or not.”

  “And I’m one of those?”

  “This many years later, I think it’s safe to say yes.”

  “I don’t want to hate you anymore,” she said, after a moment of silence.

  Harp felt bruised, as if he’d just been hit with something very heavy. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to drink himself blind or simply go to sleep and never wake up. He’d never felt so alone, even locked in the Vankila Slab, when her absence felt like a wound that wouldn’t heal. He thought nothing could make him feel worse until she moved close against him. He put his arms around her, and even though it made no sense, the warmth of her body made him miss her in a way he hadn’t for a long time. He spent the night with her sleeping in his arms and wondered if the loneliness would ever go away.