The Exiled King

by Sarah Remy

  Between his hands the surface of his desk was peppered with red droplets of spilled wine. “I don’t know. If there were, could you?”

  Her answer was a long time coming, although he saw the truth of it right away.

  “Nay,” Avani confessed, bundling the Goddess idol in silk for travel. “It’s too late for that. For better or for worse, we’re bound. For worse, I think, and they’ll come for us with torches.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” Mal promised. Wine and relief made him bold. “I’ll keep us safe.”

  I don’t want your help. She wasn’t lying. She slung her bag over her shoulder, cradled the Goddess in her arms. I won’t be your excuse.

  “Where will you go?” It was hard, so hard, not to seize the answer before she offered it. He clenched his teeth and reached for wine, then recalled the jug was on the floor.

  You’ll know when I do. She wasn’t quite good enough to shield him from her bitterness. He thought she was being unfair. Why was he any less welcome than Jacob, who nested always in her heart?

  You’re tipsy and making no sense at all. Her flash of temper said he’d hit a nerve; he felt very clever for the success. I’ve no wish to share in your intoxication. Go away.

  Avani pushed him out of her head. The spell was well done, a variation on one of his own vanishing cants. Probably she didn’t realize she’d taken the crafting of it from his internal repertoire, and without his permission. If she did know, would she be as ashamed of her own violation as she was his?

  Pot, he thought loudly, rubbing the bridge of his nose, meet kettle.

  Avani didn’t answer.

  Mal dozed for a time at his desk. He dreamed of the sea and of screaming gulls and of Rowan, his brother, piloting a ship full of dead children. When he startled awake again, his head ached viciously. He cursed the good red wine even as he mopped its remnants from his desk and the floor. His joints popped protest at the work, his body objecting to years of long hours and ill-use.

  Desma lived, but just barely. He’d used her spirit to sustain the spells that forced her to speak truths she meant to keep secret. Her life force was badly depleted, her star fading. It was Faolan’s tampering that kept Desma breathing. Whatever sidhe magics the Faolan had used to repair her broken body on Skerrit’s Pass was older and stronger than necromancy. Even her hands, so terribly damaged, were growing whole again, bone knitting and flesh scabbing, a curative made stronger by Faolan’s enchantment and Avani’s healing sorceries. Mal had loosened the bindings and splints, recaptured Avani’s maggot friends, but too late. There was not enough spirit left within Desma to appreciate the continuing marvel. She was dying as her body recovered.

  “Desma, daughter of the sand—” Mal looked down on her pallid form “—an evil man would cut you open to see what sort of enchantment keeps a lifeless husk breathing. As I am not an evil man. I’ll wait you out and give your body to the wind with proper blood sacrifice, as befits your rank.” The tattoos, he thought, were quite impressive. As were the memories he’d purloined for Renault’s sake. Desma had been brave, and accomplished. She’d loved her twin more than she’d loved any other, and she’d been ready to join him in death.

  He’d taken that from her. There would be no afterlife for Desma, no haunt left to walk the halls or be welcomed by the god she favored. Except for a feeble, struggling ember, Desma was gone. He could take that spark, too, use it to ward off the aftereffects of too much wine drunk too quickly. She’d never know to miss it. Temptation made him lick his lips.

  He hesitated, then turned away. Abandoning the dais, he flung his cape around his shoulders and pulled on his gloves. He snuffed the last of the lanterns as he left the room, securing the door with a cant behind him. He expected he’d find a cooling corpse in his bed whenever he returned.

  Upon Baldebert’s arrival in Wilhaiim, Renault had ordered Roue’s admiral and his royal contingent housed in one of the palace’s more ancient wings, as far away from court as workability allowed. There were many in the city and beyond who wished Baldebert executed for kidnapping the one man who might have stopped the Red Worm plague at its beginnings and prevented the loss of a generation. In stealing away Wilhaiim’s vocent for Roue’s use, Baldebert had committed an act of war. Because Baldebert had—albeit unknowingly—left Wilhaiim without an experienced magus during plague season, the decimation of many a flatland family lay squarely on his shoulders. Avani had done her best in Mal’s absence, but the Red Worm had taken more victims than Avani had saved.

  Baldebert’s pledge of troops and artillery to aid Wilhaiim against the desert meant nothing to parents mourning their dead children. And the theists, who themselves feared a foreign queen, were doing their outmost to fan the flames of hatred. Brother Tillion’s impassioned rhetoric had taken hold during summer months, as inexorable as any plague. The Rani, if she ever dared cross the Long Sea to her new husband’s side, would not be celebrated—far from it.

  Mal hoped Baldebert had taken it upon himself to warn the Rani of Wilhaiim’s discontent, but he suspected Roue’s queen, like her brother the admiral, would not be kept form any duty she believed essential. Baldebert had not survived years on dangerous waters through timidity. The man was, at his core, a pirate and a fearless romantic—willing to sacrifice all for the good of his sibling and her tiny principality.

  Which, as far as Mal was concerned, made Baldebert a near-perfect conspirator in roguery.

  The palace’s oldest corridors were quiet, empty. Torches burned without heat or smoke. Carpets and wall hangings were clean but visibly worn. Renault’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Elodie, gowned all in silver brocade, looked down on Mal from a mouse-eaten tapestry, clutching a posy against her breast. Elodie was remembered as a queen who loved her station more than her people, intelligent but quick to anger and slow to forgive. Mal, who knew her as the mother who had traded her firstborn son to the sidhe, was not surprised to find her likeness hidden away in a vacant part of the castle. Renault did not speak of her often.

  A Kingsman stood guard outside Baldebert’s rooms. When she saw Mal, she straightened, her mouth tightening in resignation, and stepped squarely in front of the door.

  “Russel.” Mal awarded her a mocking bow. “Back on nursery duty, I see. Renault told me you had some trouble in Whitcomb. Too bad.”

  “He’s busy,” Russel snapped. She was one of few in all Wilhaiim who believed Mal contemptible instead of frightening. Most of the time he found her refreshing. “Not to be disturbed.”

  Mal let his eyebrows rise ceilingward. “Not lost him again, have you? He’s snuck out the back, mayhap? I swear the man’s impossible to keep track of. Doesn’t make your job simple, does he?”

  Russel wouldn’t be baited. “He’s safely within, my lord. Only he asked not to be disturbed by any but the king’s private messengers.”

  “Not sent to Whore’s Street again, has he? A princely appetite indeed. No matter. I assure you, I’m not easily shocked.” Mal stepped toward the door. Russel blocked him with her pike, expression determined.

  Mal laughed. “Corporal, I am the king’s messenger, in every way that matters.”

  “He isn’t expecting you. I’ll tell him you stopped by. My lord.”

  Mal rocked back on his boot heels. This wasn’t Russel’s usual game of one-upmanship. She had been tasked with keeping him out. And not just any visitor knocking up Baldebert’s chambers, but Mal specifically.

  “Corporal.”

  “Aye, my lord?”

  “I can make you let me in.”

  Russel swallowed. The helm she wore hid her eyes but not her clenching jaw. “I’m aware, my lord. But without the admiral’s permission, or His Majesty’s missive, it’s my duty to try to stop you. In case, my lord, you mean Admiral Baldebert harm.”

  “Move aside, Russel.” Mal summoned a wisp of power. Behind him in the hall the ghost of a long-forgotten groundskeeper, ambling along the wall, insubstantial garden trowel in hand, winked out of existenc
e. Mal curled a finger. Russel’s sword, untouched, rattled angrily on her hip.

  Russel didn’t flinch. “Do as you like, my lord. I won’t be forsworn. I’ve given oath to the throne and, for the throne’s sake, to Baldebert, but I’ve never sworn any oath to you that I recall.”

  “I can see,” said Mal, “why Avani likes you.”

  “I can’t,” returned Russel, “in all honesty say the same of you, my lord.” She clapped a hand on the pommel of her sword to stop its furious dancing.

  The door to Baldebert’s chamber burst open, saving Russel from Mal’s affront.

  “Corporal! What’s all the bloody racket? Oh. It’s you, is it, Doyle?”

  Mal crossed his arms over his chest. If he’d ever learned the redheaded sailor’s name, he didn’t recall it now, but he well knew her face. She shared his own curse of a broken nose healed crooked. She was an officer, once in charge of the living engine in Baldebert’s The Cutlass Wind, and a slave. She wore gold in her ears, on her fingers, and her toes, and the iron torque of servitude around her neck. Mal had set her broken collarbone on shipboard, and later she’d sat on his chest when, raving, he’d murdered Baldebert’s first mate and tried to do worse after.

  “You look awful,” the officer said. Mal couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or sympathetic. “Come in, then, but don’t make any sudden moves. My men haven’t forgotten what you are. Best not meet anyone’s eye too close, eh, necromancer?”

  Dismissing Russel with a jerk of her chin, she led Mal into a room more window than stone. Three of the four walls and the rectangular, slanted roof were naught but a latticework of glass. The panes were clean, clear as to be almost invisible, a wall of light. The brilliance did nothing to help Mal’s aching head. The sky above the glass ceiling was cloudless. For all that the room should be an oven, no heat breached the glass. The air in the orangery was artificially mild, kept so by a shard of bone mortared into the floor and the old magic attached to it.

  “This way. Captain’s spent the morning on correspondence, but I’ve just brought him a spot of tea in the garden. Can’t say he’ll be glad to see you. I suppose you guessed that.”

  Baldebert’s mariners had made the glass room their own. Bedding and rucksacks cluttered the floor, obscuring antique, azure-tinted tile. Two men sat together, cross-legged, on a battered chaise, a map spread between them. A third crouched nearby, idly rolling dice. They looked up when Mal entered the orangery. The dice player crossed himself. His two companions looked away.

  An incongruous collection of thick rope, scarves, and sashes hung from myriad hooks on the interior stone wall. Someone had been mending leather armor. A small pile of cuirasses, smelling of oil, sat atop a table. A single white conch shell crowned a stack of books. A keg of Rouen beer waited, untapped, next to a picked-over platter of meat and cheese.

  The redheaded officer led Mal through a door cleverly concealed in the glass wall. Outside in the attached garden sparrows darted between the branches of two old sycamores and landed on the manicured lawn. Late season flowers still bloomed in beds along the periphery: coneflower, blue aster, and phlox. A Selkirk rose, pink blossoms withered to fat black rose hips, grew along a tall hedge. Mal was surprised to see the specimen alive and thriving so far from the coast.

  Baldebert sat on a rug spread beneath the trees, legs crossed in the fashion of his men. A silver pot of tea steamed at his right hand, an inkpot and scroll stand rested at his left. He did not appear pleased at the interruption.

  “Sorry, Captain. This one made enough racket at the door to raise the kraken and I feared he’d boil our corporal where she stood if I didn’t let him through the door.”

  Mal flashed his best baleful glare the officer’s way.

  “Thank you.” Baldebert stabbed a silver-tipped stylus into his inkpot. “You’re excused.” He waited until the redhead had returned to the orangery then leaned back on his palms, regarding Mal with displeasure. “What do you want?”

  “I think you know,” replied Mal. He nudged the edge of Baldebert’s rug with the side of his boot, stirring scrolls. “Best not speak it out loud; these days even the hedges have ears.”

  “If I’m to believe my own spies, the hedges are full of temple conspirators.” Baldebert poured out dark brew into a pretty tea cup. He sipped, watching Mal through hooded yellow eyes. “She was of use, I’m told, our desert wolf.”

  “Thanks to Brother Paul’s machinations, they’ve access to sidhe ways under the mountains and incentive enough to make the journey. The tribes have rallied under a single banner—for the moment they’re of one mind. They’ve no reason to wait out winter on the pass. As we’ve suspected, they’re coming now.”

  “Demon roads eschew mortal laws. ‘Now’ could mean today or in a fortnight.” Baldebert swirled his drink. He tilted his head, indicating ink and scroll. “The Cutlass Wind is the fastest of my ships, and she is here. My sister writes that she has sent our three second fastest, heavy with elephant guns, gun powder, and many good men, but they will not make land for another six weeks, at the earliest.”

  “There is more,” Mal confessed. “Desma’s uncle and cousins are traveling north and west to join troops marshalling again near Roue. Khorit Dard is dead, but the desert has not yet given up on gold and opion.”

  Baldebert flapped a dismissive hand. “Four seasons, mayhap five, before they are number enough to attack Roue again. We will be ready.”

  “If you say so. Best write the Rani now and let her know she’ll be handling the next invasion without you. If ten thousand desert warriors come swarming out of the ground tomorrow, Wilhaiim will be nothing but a memory, and your sister will be without allies or admiral.”

  Baldebert pressed his lips together. He set down his cup. “I begin to regret the day I decided stealing away Wilhaiim’s magus was a clever idea.”

  “Reap what you sow, Admiral. We saved Roue once. We’ll do it again, but first mine own people.”

  “Your solution is no solution.”

  “It will work. We have five. Parts for more. I know a capable blacksmith who could be convinced—”

  “I think, Doyle,” interrupted Baldebert harshly, “that Brother Paul might have said much the same thing to your dead armswoman and her farmer friend when convincing them to commit treason. For all the right reasons, I’m sure.”

  Mal loomed but intimidation did not work on Roue’s pirate prince. Entreaty might.

  “Paul was no magus. The Automata are my birthright. I can make them walk again. One iron man is worth one thousand living soldiers. Eight, nine may save us.”

  “You’ve never been to war.”

  “Which is why I need you.”

  “Even if it works, they’ll burn you alive, after.”

  “Let them. Your redheaded guard dog was not wrong when she said I was a breath away from taking Russel out of this world. I am not the man I was a year ago. Easy to blame a journey over deep water, but I begin to think a magus is born flawed. It takes only time to strike that fracture all the way through.”

  “And what am I, if I agree to a madman’s cockeyed plan?” demanded Baldebert, scrubbing his curls in exasperation.

  Mal smiled. The game was won. “Prudent. You trusted me to save your ship, and your sister’s kingdom,” he said. “Trust me one last time.”

  Baldebert rose from his blanket. He made a show of dusting off his sailor’s trousers and loose shirt. His fingers lingered on the ivory cuffs hanging always from his belt. Then he essayed a half bow and held out that same hand for Mal to shake, a promise made.

  “Your ‘capable blacksmith’ takes Orat’s coin,” he said, lips curving. “I’ve a man on my ship knows his way around forge and anvil, and we can trust him to keep our secret safe.”

  The Mabon tree was a beautiful specimen. Almost as tall as the nearby barrack’s tower, it wore its years in the circumference of its wide, smooth trunk and in the spread of its boughs. Mal stood in the shelter of its branches, orange needles fanned a
bove his head and spread, dropped, on the ground below his feet, colorful as one of Avani’s rugs. He retrieved a handful of shed needles from around the trunk, crushing them in gloved fingers, inhaling their pungent scent. It was the perfume of harvest festival, when day and night hung in balance, and every villein prepared for winter. The orange-needled branches were burned in iron baskets outside the palace, and on the king’s hearth, and in the Wilhaiim’s temple; the tree’s sap made the flames jump with uncommon rainbow color.

  Poorer houses burned evergreen or sheaves of wheat as an appeal to the one god, in hopes that he might keep the coming longer nights at bay. The dark hours came anyway but the memories of a good Mabon festival might keep a person warm until Winter Ceilidh came around again.

  Mal had recognized the tree through Jacob’s eyes. It hadn’t been difficult to find, one ruddy tree growing tall above a green canopy. He’d come on it through the Royal Gardens, avoiding the barrack’s entrance. The knot of woods where Liam and his young friends had been chased by Holder’s straw men was calm now, birds and small animals dozing in the waning afternoon. Mal’s feet made no sound in the thick underbrush. He was practiced at sneaking. Thanks to a concealment cant, even the fox drowsing under a gorse bush didn’t notice his passing.

  But Jacob was no longer in the Mabon tree. A vole nested in the trunk near the tree’s crown, and many tiny insects made homes in its branches. If Mal closed his eyes he could track their scurrying in his head, streaks of light, insignificant glimmers compared to the greater flare of the fox under the gorse and the small suns that were three pages playing at stick fighting in the barrack’s courtyard. Wherever the raven had gone, he was no longer anywhere close. It would be difficult, although not impossible, to separate the bird from the buzz of radiance that was Wilhaiim entire.

  Mal uncurled his fingers and let aromatic needles fall from his hand.

  One meager spirit out of the many refused to be ignored. It had followed Mal from the bailey and through the Royal Gardens at a distance, always chary of coming too close, but tenacious in pursuit. Human, and unusual in that it faded and then dazzled, only to ebb and burst forth again. Mal, gripped by curiosity, had done nothing to end the chase. He’d increased and decreased his pace through the gardens, stopping beside a burbling fountain when the distance stretched, or lengthening his stride when the stalker grew too near. It was an exercise in patience, a distraction from disquiet. Mal had been trained in the contest of cat and mouse; his adversary obviously had not.