The Exiled King

by Sarah Remy

  Dedication

  For Aidan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Pursuit

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Surrender

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Sarah Remy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Pursuit

  The moon, fat and silver in the night sky, was no friend to the small party of soldiers hunkered low in the dubious shelter of late-blooming gorse bush. The night was bright as a summer afternoon, and hardly cooler. Moonlight set white sand dunes ablaze and threw every shadow into stark relief. A staggered trail of footprints disturbed the smooth sand up and across the dunes away from Whitcomb to the north, clear as day even at two hours past midnight.

  Russel used the back of her hand to swipe sweat from the tip of her nose as she considered the trail.

  “He’s not far ahead,” Lory said, his voice a whisper in the sluggish, salt-laden breeze. “And look there—blood on the sand, if only a little. Martin’s arrow struck true.”

  A miracle in itself, Russel knew, as Martin’s skill lay with the sword, not the bow, and they’d been riding hell-for-leather through Whitcomb’s narrow streets when he’d loosed his arrow in a last attempt to slow their quarry. Russel thought Martin had been aiming for the man’s horse; instead the arrow had stuck in the spy’s leather-clad calf.

  “Bleeding steadily,” Martin agreed. The gap-toothed man lay on his belly in the sand. The gorse bush did little to shield his bulky form. “Pulled the arrow right out, looks like. Guess the desert breeds ’em stupid.”

  “Managed to lose all three of us in a village the size of my granny’s herb garden, and I know Whitcomb better than most,” Russel retorted. “Mayhap not so stupid as all that.”

  Lory grunted agreement. The Kingsmen stared mournfully at the trail of blood and footprints in the moonlight. In a moment Russel would give the order to stand and charge, but none of the three were eager to rise. It wasn’t that the job was difficult—they were highly trained soldiers in a well-schooled army—but that it was impossible. They’d been chasing the desert scout along Wilhaiim’s coast for near a day and a half, having promised their betters to bring the man in alive. But it had become apparent that the fellow intended to die.

  “Wishing you’d stayed behind, are you, Corporal?” Lory guessed. He’d shaved his beard against the summer heat. He looked ten years younger without it. “Prefer dogging the pirate prince about the palace to getting dirty with the likes of us?”

  It was a good-natured jab, said to pass the time while they caught their breath and considered their options, but it smarted. Wilhaiim didn’t much care for Admiral Baldebert, not since he’d first stolen their magus away and then engineered a betrothal between their king and Baldebert’s own royal sister. Russel, as the admiral’s part-time bodyguard, was not as immune to the chiding tossed her way in the barracks as she’d like. Her fellow soldiers didn’t blame her for the assignment—she’d sworn to serve the throne, as had every man and woman in the king’s scarlet uniform, and the throne desired Baldebert alive—but it was possible they wished she’d show some resentment for the task.

  “Fuck you, Lory,” Russel said amiably. She squinted through the gorse at the moon. It would be setting soon, but not before the sun showed its face. Tonight, like the night before, they wouldn’t be able to rely on the cover of darkness.

  “Ayup?” Martin prompted, which meant he’d caught his breath and come to terms with their certain failure.

  Russel nodded. “Stay low. There’s naught but bracken and dune north from here till next week. Bleeding or not, he’ll be waiting. Up!”

  As one they rose and drew their swords, jumping the gorse and scaling the dunes, like hounds on the scent. They ran quietly but for the rattle of leather and the soft clink of Martin’s chain coif. The sand was uneven and made the going difficult, but Russel had hours ago grown used to aching muscles. She hadn’t slept since they’d left Wilhaiim’s gates on word that there was a yellow-eyed sand snake holed up in Whitcomb. She hadn’t bothered with food since a sparse breakfast of dried ham and spring wine. Her belly was hollow, but her pulse was racing, her teeth gritted in fierce joy, her entire being focused on pursuit.

  Russel was a Kingsman, sworn to the throne, and she’d do whatever Renault required of her without complaint, even if that meant saving the kingdom’s most hated man from himself, but she wouldn’t pretend she hadn’t missed this, this rush of danger, this dance on the knife-edge of possibilities.

  She came up over a dune the size of a small house, howling challenge, and the desert spy waited on the other side, curved blade glittering in the moonlight. He swung his sword as she fell upon him. She twisted away, barely avoiding its bite, rolled in the sand, and was up again even as the blade sliced the ground near her feet, sending up a small shower of grit.

  He pivoted, blocking her strike. Their blades crossed, steel sliding against iron. He was larger, but she was stronger. Martin was right; the man had made a mistake in pulling the arrow from his leg. The sand around him was dark with his blood. He was surely dying.

  “Yield,” she said, as blade kissed blade. Lory and Martin came around the dune together, intending chaos. They stopped when they saw Russel and stood still but for the heaving of their chests, watching.

  “I yield,” the sand snake said in the king’s lingua. He smiled.

  He had very white teeth in a narrow face. His yellow eyes were limpid, his skin turning gray under a desert tan. He’d pulled the arrow because he meant to die. He was quite young, she saw with a shock of muted distress, younger even than Liam. The beard on his face was naught but peach fuzz.

  War tended to turn boys into men before their time.

  “He’s all but dead,” Lory said, disgusted. “Lord Malachi will have our hides. Martin, you shit.”

  “I was aiming for the horse,” Martin said, aggrieved.

  The boy dripped blood on the sand. The scimitar wobbled in his hand then fell from his fingers. He slumped sideways.

  “By the Aug!” Russel swore. She kicked the curved sword out of reach as she sheathed her own. “Lory, grab him. Martin, staunch the wound. Quick! Mayhap it’s not too—”

  But the spy bucked in Lory’s grip, gurgling his last. The dunes drank his blood; the scent of iron mingled with the salt in the air.

  Russel swore again and kicked the scimitar until it pinwheeled in the sand. Then she took a breath.

  “Go through his pack,” she ordered. “Turn out his pouch. Mayhap there’s something of use to the king.”

  But there wasn’t.

  Russel and Lory were both theist enough to protest when Martin suggest they strip the boy’s corpse and leave it for the crabs and birds and coyotes. Martin, vociferously pragmatic, pointed out that no good could come of hauling a dead desert spy in full view back along the King’s Highway to Wilhaiim, that considering the end-of-summer heat the corpse would soon begin to stink, and that if Lord Malachi wanted to interrogate the boy’s spirit, Martin would be happy to show the necromancer exactly where the lad had bled out—
but only after the lot of them had a chance to eat, sleep, and explain their failure to the king.

  Lory objected and the two men almost came to blows. Russel backed them down with a few well-chosen expletives.

  “We’re burying him,” she decided. “Here. Cut the feathers from his hair, take his belt. We’ll keep those, and the sword. The pouch and his pack. Everything else belongs to the god.”

  Martin pressed his lips together in disapproval, but did as she ordered, using his belt knife to cut feathered ornaments from the boy’s long sun-bleached hair. He set the collection carefully to one side, then added the boy’s belt and curved sword.

  Digging in the dune was much like walking on the dune: awkward and irritating. Sand slid back into the hole almost as soon as they scooped it free. Lacking shovels, they dug with hands and pieces of gorse bush. Lory, struck by inspiration, kicked off one boot and used it as a makeshift spade. Russel and Martin soon followed suit. Grit coated their mouths and eyes and settled in worse places.

  They tipped the spy into the ground just as the moon sank behind Whitcomb. Russel closed his yellow eyes before they pushed sand back into the hole. The dune rolled easily over his cooling corpse. When it was done, Lory marked the grave with a sprig of blooming gorse and two smooth ocean stones they’d freed from the sand in their digging.

  “In case we do need to find him again,” he said, although they all knew the shifting terrain would consume the small monument in a matter of days. Then even Mal, she thought, would have difficulty finding the grave.

  Russel crossed herself, right shoulder to left, brow to groin, and said a silent prayer to anyone who might be listening that when someday she went to ground it would be in cooler weather and into damper soil. The sand made her itch.

  “Right, then.” She picked up the scimitar, slung the boy’s belt and pack over her shoulder, and tossed the feathers and embroidered pouch at Martin. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 1

  Master Paul was laid to ground with quiet ceremony in the temple’s private sepulcher. King Renault stood attendance as four tonsured priests carried the Masterhealer’s casket into the narrow gray stone building where Paul would sleep forever with the boxed bones of his predecessors. Wilhaiim’s Masterhealer, it turned out, was favored even after death. The sepulcher was an elaborate edifice, the lintel carved all over with birds and saints. The temple’s chalice and barbed spear glittered above the door, delicately rendered in colored glass.

  Avani, standing to the left and two paces behind Renault, couldn’t help but recall the window in the Masterhealer’s private sanctuary. That window bore the chalice and the spear in all its glory. Paul’s sanctuary was now declared desecrated, defiled by bloodshed and violence. The new Masterhealer would have to set up office in a different part of the temple; the old sanctuary was even now being sealed, the door ensorcelled, marked with the theist sigils that would keep it securely locked.

  Avani could feel the temple magic at work—a shiver in her limbs, come up from the grass beneath her feet all the way to her teeth. The strength of it made her sigh. The yellow gem in Andrew’s ring winked against her breast.

  “A powerful incantation,” Mal murmured from where he stood at Renault’s right hand. The magus looked idly up at the old fruit trees planted to shade the tomb. Sparrows fluttered in the branches, disturbed by the commotion below. “Whatever the priests think remains in that room, they’re desperate to keep it behind closed doors.”

  “I told you—Paul’s ghost is well and truly banished,” Avani breathed. Between them Renault mouthed the words of the burial ritual with placid solemnity. A small contingent of senior priests, standing in the shade against the sepulcher, did the same. It did not escape Avani’s notice that they watched the king closely as they did so.

  The temple and the throne, allies for generations, were lately suffering a painful fracture.

  “I saw to him myself,” she added, watching the theists watch the king. Brother Tillion, the priest who appeared to spend most of his waking hours railing against Renault’s recent betrothal, was the only one of the group who seemed more interested in the burial rites than the king’s party. He leaned against a heavy staff, yellow eyes fastened on the door of the tomb, expression so rapt as to be almost feverish.

  “That one will be the thorn in our side,” predicted Mal, following the direction of Avani’s gaze. “The genuinely pious always are.”

  Renault grimaced. Avani, who knew the king was a devout man, frowned. Mal only smiled blandly in Tillion’s direction.

  And they say I’m mad, the magus whispered in her head, as the four priests, relieved of the Masterhealer’s casket, stepped back out of the sepulcher and into the garden. At least I have an excuse. I wager Tillion burst raving from the womb.

  As one, the pallbearers fell to their knees in the grass before the tomb. The congregation of priests beneath the fruit trees did the same. Renault bowed his head but remained standing. The theists began to sing in unison, voices ranged from deep to shrill. The canticle was unfamiliar, the words foreign to Avani’s ear, but the poignancy of the call made her heart squeeze.

  When they finished, the last low syllable quieted, sigils previously obscured by the carving around the sepulcher’s door burst to life, burning indigo before fading to pale silver. The ritual was over, Master Paul safely entombed.

  Look how he holds himself, Mal added, irreverent. When Avani pushed disapproval across their link, his mouth curled at the edges, but he continued, Look how he checks himself, how he grips his stick. As if he fears his joints will shatter. Notice the tick in his jaw, the way his left eye rolls away from his right. Mayhap that disfunction of the brain the healers call glass syndrome. Possibly of the waxing and waning variety. I’ve seen it before, but not for many years. In truth, I believed it bred to dormancy—

  “Malachi,” Renault interrupted mildly, “you grin as if it’s Ceilidh night and you’ve been given a gift to rival all others. Mayhap recall where you are and school your face appropriately before I’m accused of engineering Paul’s demise amongst my other trespasses.”

  Chastened, Mal subsided. Avani wondered if it was possible Renault suspected the illicit connection she had, all unknowingly, forged with his vocent. It would mean her death, and Mal’s, if ever Renault did more than suspect. The king’s great-grandfather had ordered magi burned at the stake for much less. Renault, realistic as well as devout, would bend precedent for the good of the throne, but not so far as to put his people at risk.

  He loved Mal, but he loved Wilhaiim more. If the truth came out, Renault would sacrifice the one for the sake of the other.

  As for Avani, Renault was kind to the foreign witch who stood now at his side, but that, she knew, was for Mal’s sake as much as for his own. She was a useful tool in the throne’s armory, her worth proven, but not so valuable that she could not be put aside, even as Wilhaiim charged headlong toward war.

  Renault would blame her, she thought. For the link, which grew stronger daily even as she pretended otherwise, and for the tenacious darkness lurking just behind Mal’s green gaze.

  Renault—devout, practical, yet unbowed by the weight of his crown—would likely weep over her loss even as he set the first flame to her pyre.

  “Goddess have mercy,” Avani said as the king and his dissenting priests crossed themselves a final time. She hoped Master Paul, at least, had left all fear behind.

  “On every one of us,” Mal, who did not believe in god or goddess, agreed. He’d switched his focus from Tillion to Avani. She raised a brow. His distracted smile sharpened to real amusement.

  “Brother Orat,” Renault said, alerting his companions to the approaching contingent of robed priests. The theists were gathering for a chance to nip at the king. Avani hoped they would not blacken the beauty of Master Paul’s farewell with fiery words. Their discontent was a palpable force. Theists drew their magic from books of spells and ancient liturgy; they could not claim the innate power of vo
cent or witch. Even so, temple magic was a not a trifling thing. The garden seemed to grow chill as they approached. The birds in the branches of the fruit trees quieted. Avani cupped her hand around Andrew’s ring to mute the gem’s angry glow. Mal’s signet, twin to Andrew’s, flashed a warning from the index finger of his left hand, a small yellow sun.

  Brother Orat did not appear put off. He’d been long enough in Renault’s service to retain some confidence that Mal would not smite him where he stood simply for the robes he wore. Avani was less positive. Mal’s fury simmered in her head, bright as the ring on his finger.

  Brother Orat bowed from the waist. “Majesty,” he said. The other priests milled at his heels. Tillion, taller by a head than the others, leaned hard on his staff.

  “Brother Orat,” the king replied. He did not so much as incline his head in greeting. Before the Masterhealer’s death Orat had been Renault’s spy in Wilhaiim’s temple, another tool in the throne’s collection. But now, as a senior priest, he was wanted at the temple.

  Just as Renault will always choose Wilhaiim, she thought, Orat will choose his god.

  Wrong, corrected Mal. His derision rang in her skull, but it was not for her. Orat will always choose himself.

  “Thank you for coming, Majesty,” Orat said. “You honor both the god and Brother Paul with you presence.”

  “I am sorry for the temple’s loss.” Renault did not say he would miss the Masterhealer because he would not, and he preferred to speak the truth whenever possible. “Paul deserved better than Lane’s sword in his heart.”

  “Lane was your dog,” Tillion said. He did not look at Renault when he spoke, but at the grass and the sky, the roses and the sky again. Avani, who had seen the priest performing in the town square, could not quite reconcile this restless form with that of the charismatic preacher on his box. “Was she not?”

  “She was not,” Renault retorted. “I do not condone the murder of innocents. I regret she was not taken alive, to face my judgment.”