Ice Forged (The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga)

by Gail Z. Martin

  Blaine frowned. “Did he allow it?”

  Judith shook her head. “No. Instead, he brokered an arranged marriage with Oten Simmons and forced her to go through with it.”

  Blaine drew a deep breath, struggling with the sudden pang of loss that lanced through his chest. “I knew Oten. He was a decent sort, but much older.”

  Judith nodded. “Older, established, dependable, and just threadbare enough to barter his respectability for the Rhystorp fortune.”

  Blaine winced. “Respectability,” he repeated bitterly. “I’d always wondered how badly my actions damaged Carensa’s reputation. I guess that’s my answer.”

  “Carensa changed after you left,” Judith said quietly. “She shut everyone out. Despite her father’s protests, she managed to get Oten to allow her to study with a tutor, and the studies seemed to be her only passion, even after her son was born.”

  “Son?” The word caught in Blaine’s throat. He had resigned himself to the possibility that Carensa had become another man’s wife, but the reality that she had borne someone else a child hurt like a fresh wound.

  “I saw him once or twice, at a distance,” Judith said. “He was a healthy lad, who took after his father.”

  “When the magic died, was Rhystorp spared?”

  Judith met his gaze and slowly shook her head. “Rhystorp was completely destroyed. Oten and the boy are buried in the family cemetery, along with Carensa’s father.”

  “And Carensa?”

  “Her body was never found,” Judith said. She reached out to touch his hand. “I’m sorry, Blaine.”

  Blaine swallowed hard and nodded. “Thank you for telling me. I shouldn’t be surprised that she moved on; after all, I married Selane. All these years, I told myself it was likely that she’d married. I wanted her to be happy, to escape my shame. It’s just different, knowing for certain.”

  Judith cleared her throat. “You never finished your story, about how you managed to return.”

  Blaine sighed, grateful for the change of topic, thankful for his aunt’s perceptiveness. “When Velant fell, we found ourselves sovereign, for all practical purposes,” he said. He gave a bitter chuckle. “Would you believe that I was named to the ruling Council?”

  Judith shrugged. “You were, after all, a lord—by birth if no longer by law.”

  Blaine shook his head. “No one knew that except for Kestel. To everyone else, including my housemates until very recently, I was just Mick, a common murderer with a penchant for settling brawls.”

  Judith’s lip quirked in an almost smile. “Mick,” she repeated, and Blaine heard the amusement in her voice. “A solid street name.” Her smile faded, and she met his gaze. “So who is the man who sits across from me? Blaine? Or Mick?”

  Blaine took a sip from his glass and did not speak right away. “I’m not really sure,” he said finally. “If it had been up to Mick, I’d have stayed in Edgeland. Life there is never easy, but I’d carved out something fairly comfortable, something thoroughly my own.” He let out a long breath. “Mick had no reason to leave. Blaine had no right to stay.”

  Judith’s brow furrowed as she looked at him quizzically. “How so?”

  Judith listened patiently without interrupting as Blaine told his tale. “So, according to some ancient texts and some equally ancient talishte, I’m quite possibly the last surviving Lord of the Blood,” Blaine ended his story. “And maybe the only one who can bring the magic back to Donderath.”

  He waited for her response, half expecting her to break out laughing at his implausible tale. Instead, she rose from her seat, set aside her glass, and walked to the bookshelves on the other side of the room, returning with a worn, leather-bound book filled with yellowed parchment pages.

  “Lord of the Blood,” she repeated quietly, untying the old ribbon that bound the book together and carefully turning the fragile pages. “I haven’t heard that term for a very long while.”

  “At first, I thought it was nonsense,” Blaine said. “But Lanyon Penhallow sets stock by it.” His hand went absently to the recent scars on his shoulder. “And apparently, Pentreath Reese is willing to kill me in order to stop me.”

  Judith ran a thin finger down the parchment page. “Lord of the Blood,” she repeated softly, and then turned the book so that Blaine could see.

  “This is a history of the McFadden family,” Judith said. “This book is quite old, and the history was copied down from the tales and names passed from father to son for generations.” She grimaced. “Aside from your father, the McFaddens had a distinguished and reputable line.

  “I came across that phrase when I looked up some bit of family history to please Ian,” she said. “And it stuck in my mind. Here it is,” she added, noting a page near the very beginning of the book.

  Blaine leaned over the book. The handwriting was small and the ink was faded, making him strain to make out the lettering. He frowned. “Lord Rogarth McFadden, liege man to Hougen, king of all Donderath,” he read aloud. “One of the thirteen Lords of the Blood.”

  “Why did you come back?” Judith watched Blaine, waiting for an answer.

  He leaned back from the book and sighed. “Crazy as it sounds, I came back to make the magic work again, if I can. I came back to go to Mirdalur and see if blood tells.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  BLAINE AWOKE JUST AS THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN lit the horizon. He lay looking up at the familiar ceiling for a few moments, luxuriating in the feel of a real bed and the comfort of good linens. Waking in his old room at Glenreith seemed like something out of a dream, yet he had the events of the night before to convince him of its reality. And more importantly, he reminded himself, swinging his legs out of bed, there was work to be done.

  Blaine dressed and slipped silently downstairs, letting himself out of the manor house. He stood at the top of a small hill as the sun came up, and looked out over the ruined fortress that had been the old manor. The grand building was now merely a pile of rubble. Blaine made his way through the brambles and overgrowth toward the burying grounds. A large oak tree marked the spot where his mother was buried. He remembered how majestically the oak had risen high into the sky, spreading its branches over a large area, standing watch over more than a century of Glenreith’s dead. Now a splintered trunk, blackened by lightning and stripped of bark by insects, was all that remained.

  Although the old manor had not been the family’s residence for a long time, Blaine had played in its deserted hallways as a child. Built to withstand a war, the old manor had been used to billet troops back in the day when a lord kept his own private army. And with the way things are now, it might come to that again, Blaine thought. But now the heavy stone walls of the old manor were rubble. He could see blackened places where the magic fire Connor had told them about had scorched the thick rocks of the old building. The walls of the old manor had been three feet thick, yet they had tumbled like a child’s blocks. Blaine shivered. If that kind of power had struck at the other nobles’ homes, it was indeed quite possible that he was the last surviving Lord of the Blood.

  Blaine trampled down the dry, dead weeds around the tombstones. Lord Ian’s grave was the most recent. Blaine avoided his father’s grave and stood beside his mother’s stone, then sank down on one knee next to the oak tree and covered his eyes with his hand. The tears that flowed were old tears, long denied. Grief pressed down on him as he mourned for Carensa, for possibilities lost forever, and for all that had been swept away by magic’s fall. In his years in Edgeland, Blaine had never permitted himself to feel the full weight of grief for everything he had left behind, and now it choked him with its intensity.

  When his sorrow was spent, Blaine made his way to a small reflecting pool and brushed aside the thin ice to splash his face with freezing-cold water. It braced him like a slap, making his eyes sting.

  Blaine returned to the house and slipped into the kitchen entrance, removed his boots and cloak, and silently climbed the servants’ stairs. His ruse ena
bled him to saunter down the main staircase as if he had just come from his room. Familiar voices rose in greeting from the great hall.

  “Best of the morning to you,” Verran called to him with an exaggerated cheeriness. All of his friends, except Geir, were seated at the long great-hall table. “We wondered how long it would be before you joined us.” He made a show of stretching. “Personally, I slept better than I have in years, since I didn’t have to listen to you and Piran thrash in your sleep.”

  “I don’t thrash,” Piran muttered.

  Dawe gave him a look. “Trust us. You thrash. Wake up fighting your way out of the blankets, cursing and swinging. Mick’s nearly as bad. Last night was the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in years.”

  Kestel made a show of stretching sinuously. “I had a marvelous night’s rest,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Good morning, Mick. Or should we start calling you Blaine?”

  Blaine grimaced as he pulled up a chair near his friends and sat down. A platter of sausages lay in front of them, as well as a bowl of pickled eggs and a loaf of crusty bread. A kettle, recently enough pulled from the hearth to still be steaming, sat next to a bowl of dried herbs and berries that Blaine recognized as a homemade substitute for more costly—and probably unavailable—tea.

  “None of you have ever had trouble coming up with something to call me,” Blaine replied. He took a sausage from the plate and wrapped it in a piece of bread, taking time for a bite while he considered his answer.

  Piran chuckled. “True enough. And may I say, you earned every one of the names I’ve used for you over the years.”

  Kestel rolled her eyes. “Be serious,” she admonished Piran. She looked at Blaine. “So what’s it to be?”

  Blaine sighed. “You knew Mick, so call me Mick. Aunt Judith and the others knew Blaine, and I figure that’s what they’ll call me, even if I tried to change it. We have much more important things to discuss than what name I go by.”

  Kestel met his eyes. “My grandmother was particular about names. She said that how you’re called—and how you call yourself—matters. Before all’s said and done, I think you’ll need to decide who you really are,” she added quietly.

  “Maybe,” he replied. “But not today.”

  Piran snorted. “We’re already well into today, thank you very much,” he said. “And while the lord of the manor was sleeping, some of us got a leg up on the day.” He leaned back, hooking one arm over the back of the chair, and bit a chunk from the sausage he held. “I’ve already been out and done reconnaissance.”

  “And?” Blaine asked, pouring himself a cup of the substitute tea. Judith had always been quite particular about her tea, and he knew that the homemade substitute was another clue to just how far his family’s fortunes had fallen.

  “For one thing, I caught a spy.”

  Blaine’s attention refocused immediately. “How do you know he was a spy?”

  “Because he was spying—how do you think I know?” Piran replied. “I caught a man posted at the edge of the woods with a looking glass who seemed awfully interested in what was going on inside the manor.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t just kill him.” Blaine sighed.

  “Of course not,” Piran replied indignantly. “I figured we could at least interrogate him before we killed him.”

  “So where is he?”

  Piran frowned. “Well, that’s the funny thing. When I knocked him out, I searched him for weapons, and for some clue as to why he was there. Figured he must belong to someone, and that those Reese or Pollard fellows were the logical suspects. And what do you know? Turns out he’s bitten up and down his arms like our friend Connor, which makes me think he’s Reese’s man.”

  Blaine looked at Piran. “What did you do with him?”

  Piran shrugged. “Tied him up and threw him in the cellars. Figured Geir would want to be around to question him.”

  “If he’s really Reese’s man, you’d have done better to kill him,” Kestel replied. “He’s Reese’s eyes and ears, through the kruvgaldur.”

  Piran gave a slow, knowing smile. “Now that you mention it, I did remember that little trick. So I blindfolded him and stuffed a bit of rag in each ear, and put a hood on him when we brought him through the gates. Told the guard at the gate who took him to say nothing around him and to make sure he was in a place where no one would find him, locked up good. He’ll have nothing to report to his master except darkness and silence.”

  “Good work,” Blaine said, taking a sip of the tea and grimacing at the flavor. “Anything else?”

  Piran shrugged. “Got a map of the roads and figured out our choices to get from here to Mirdalur. Wanted to know what our options were if we’ve got Reese and Pollard on our tail. If your aunt can spare the men, I think it would be a good idea to take a few guards with us, just in case.”

  Blaine nodded. “Sounds reasonable. I’ll talk to Aunt Judith about it—I have no idea how the manor is staffed right now,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “Frankly, I’m amazed there are any servants left at all.”

  Dawe stretched out his lanky frame. “I was up before the lot of you,” he said, yawning. “Got a good look at the blacksmith’s forge. It’s still in use and actually in pretty good shape, so I talked to the smith and showed him the pieces I want to forge. With luck, we’ll work on it this afternoon, in exchange for my help shoeing some horses,” he said with a grin. “Which means that in a day or two, we might have a couple of my altered crossbows ready for service.”

  Verran grinned. “I’ve actually been retained by the lady of the manor for a little job,” he said, interlacing his fingers and then stretching his hands in front of him. “Seems there’s a locked trunk in your father’s room that she’s been dying to break into, and lacked someone with the necessary skills.”

  “Count me in on that adventure,” Blaine said. “If Aunt Judith thinks there’s something hidden in the trunk, I’m betting it’s something we’ll find interesting. I told her what we’re planning to do, and she wasn’t as surprised as I expected.”

  “I’m worried that we haven’t heard anything from Penhallow,” Kestel said. “I thought he’d be waiting for us when we got here. Do you think he and Connor survived the ambush?”

  Blaine shrugged. “I hope so. Although I can’t say I completely trust either of them, Penhallow seemed like a good guy to have on our side—whatever his reasons. And Connor is a decent sort. It helps to have friends, especially if Reese and Pollard are against us.”

  “Maybe Geir knows something he’s not telling us,” Dawe said. “After all, Penhallow is his master. Maybe he’s got the same kind of bond Connor has.”

  “We’ll have to wait until sunset to find out anything from Geir.” Blaine shook his head. “If Penhallow isn’t here—and assuming he’s not more dead than usual—he’s got his reasons. Since Pollard’s men were camped out here, perhaps Reese has Penhallow pinned down somewhere.”

  Kestel frowned. “Do we know for certain why Pollard’s men were here? If he sent the assassin to Edgeland to kill Mick, why come after Glenreith?”

  “I can answer that.” They all looked toward the doorway. Judith stood in the entrance, looking surprisingly awake despite the late night before.

  “Please, come join us,” Blaine said, standing to pull back a chair for Judith. She smiled, and took a seat next to Blaine.

  “Vedran Pollard has had his eye on Glenreith since you went to Velant,” Judith said with a glance toward Blaine. “Even more so after the other manors were completely destroyed.” She paused. “At first, he tried courting me, if you can believe that!”

  Blaine smiled. “You’re a fine-looking woman, Aunt Judith. I don’t think it’s so remarkable that a man might pay you court.”

  Judith dismissed his compliment with a shake of her head. “Anyone but Vedran Pollard, and I might have been flattered. But I’ve never liked that man, nor trusted his business dealings. And while my late, unlamented brother had his faili
ngs, his judgment of business partners wasn’t one of them. He thought Pollard was a snake.”

  “And coming from him, that’s saying something,” Blaine muttered.

  “Pollard wanted Glenreith’s lands, and I’m certain he thought we had more coin hidden away than we did,” Judith went on. “But I always thought there was more to it than what he was saying. And after our conversation last night,” she said with a glance at Blaine, “I’m sure of it.”

  “Pollard’s illegitimate,” Kestel said. “That’s why he’s not a Lord of the Blood, even though his family is descended from the thirteen original lords. It wouldn’t matter if he managed to buy, bully, or steal all of the old lords’ manors and titles—that won’t change blood.”

  “When I didn’t fall for his flattery, Pollard got nasty,” Judith continued. “He tried to blackmail me, but after what happened with Blaine and Ian, I told him that we had no reputation left to lose and that nothing he could say about us mattered a whit.”

  Blaine flinched. Judith patted his arm. “None of that. We’ve already been over it. Ian had to die.”

  “I like your aunt,” Piran said with a grin. “Very practical.”

  Judith managed to look flattered. “I’m a survivor.” She drew a deep breath. “Anyway, when flowers and blackmail failed, Pollard tried to buy off the guards, intimidate the servants, anything to ruin what little was left. Every time I’d rebuff one of his offers, we’d find a field of wheat burned, or horses in the pasture lamed, or fences broken down to let the livestock out.” She shook her head. “After the Great Fire, it got so bad that I had to post guards, and even then we couldn’t keep him completely at bay.”

  “So now he’s taken to occupying the front yard?” Blaine asked.

  Judith shrugged. “Apparently so. At first, Edward and I thought it was just harassment. A few of Pollard’s men were watching the manor house, so I sent an armed guard with anyone who had to leave the walls. Then, two days ago, Pollard sent more men and made an actual encampment. The men were armed. We took it for the beginning of a siege, and no one has left since then.” She shook her head. “Thank the gods we had the foresight to bring in what livestock we still have so they weren’t stranded out in the fields.” Judith sighed. “Our flocks and herds aren’t nearly as sizable as before the Great Fire, and the magic storms took an additional toll. But with luck, we’ll have enough to make it to spring.”