by Amy Little
Yet she had to break the spell. She could not relax, not now that dark thoughts were preying on her mind again. “What will happen next? My father is dead. My sister missing, presumed dead. The castle is almost destroyed.”
His face looked as though it was carved in stone. “So are the castles of the other Houses.”
She took some moments to think about this. “What is it the snakes seek?”
He answered without hesitation, “The end of peace in our Empire. The end of all the major House bloodlines. The death of us all.”
She shivered. “Will you return to your House?”
“For now, yes.”
“Why don’t you stay?”
“The link between our Houses would only encourage the snakes to attack again. We need to recover our strength. I need to see what had happened to my castle and people. You will be ably advised here by the castellan and your captain. I will return.”
She nodded. She did not expect it to be otherwise. Yet she had to ask, “When will you return?”
“As soon as I can. Soon.” He wanted this to be true. He held her close. “No matter what will happen, I will come back for you.”
She could feel her heart jump. She wished she could believe him, but she told herself she had to be cautious. Everyone had previously let her down. But Zak was not just everyone.
Could she put her faith in him?
The funeral procession stretched for four blocks. At its head walked four Memory Beasts, drawing behind them a gold-plated carriage, inside which lay Annika’s father’s body.
It was ironic, Annika thought, such glitz for a man who had been monk-like in his habits.
After Annika’s carriage, which was second in line, came the city’s nobility and four other carriages, one for each House. Inside, rode the House heads. The less important members of the Houses walked behind in small groups. Fanning out in all directions around them were each of the House’s guards.
Annika looked out the window with a sense of lost detachment.
People in the thin crowd that lined the streets watched in silence.
The silence inside her seemed to mirror theirs.
Snowflakes started to fall from the sky. They landed on top of the horses that drew Annika’s carriage and melted almost immediately.
Annika wished her carriage had been open-roofed. That way, she thought maybe at least the cold wet flakes of snow could have prompted her to life – cold, pain, anything to take her out of the quietude that she felt, which to her seemed to border on stupor.
The burial took place at the Tiger House burial vault, an enormous underground structure, lit at the entrance by the flickering flames, with its furthest reaches cold and shrouded in an impenetrable dark.
The ominous coldness of the outer dark reaches of the vault sent shivers through Annika.
A thin man with a tonsure whispered to Annika the words she was expected to say.
Annika followed his prompts. She had no doubt her words sounded as dead as she felt inside. This was not the farewell that her father deserved. And yet, if she could speak from the heart, what would she say? All she could find inside herself was silence.
The senior nobility from each of the Houses silently filed past her to pay their respects.
The notion of her being the head of the House of the Tiger, now, placed a heavy weight on her shoulders. I never wanted this, she wanted to scream.
Zak passed her, alongside the others from the House of the Wolf.
She could see the concern in his eyes. She wanted to reach out, take his hand, yet of course could not. Instead, as he leaned in to say his condolences, she whispered, “When will I see you again?”
“You will. Not yet.”
As he filed out behind the others, she felt even more blank than before. Not even when she had fled Karrum for the river lands, did she feel so utterly lost and alone.
At least a quarter of the castle had been burned. The crenellations were singed. Most of the outhouses were reduced to no more than a chimney, which was often the only part of a house that was made of brick.
Annika felt a pang thinking of the people who must have lost all of their possessions in those fires.
The castellan, who sat in her carriage, remarked: “Your highness has lost much property in the fires.”
“Who started the fires,” Annika asked, almost relieved to cast her mind to something concrete.
“It was said that the snake men were coming up from near the chapel. So the houses around there were burned to drive them back. Others said it was the snake men who had started the fires,” the castellan explained.
He was trying to be helpful but the vague response made Annika’s head hurt.
“The people need to be fed and housed,” she said. “Please see to it.”
“There will be thousands of them.” The castellan moped his head. “Your highness, we do not have enough space nor food for them.”
“What do you suggest?” Annika exclaimed, flushed with anger. “We let them starve?”
“Many of them will have families outside the city. Let them return to the countryside, my highness. For if we feed them, then we will forego our duty to those inside the castle by being unable to feed them – and those inside the castle typically have lived here for generations. They will not have any outside assistance, unlike the newcomers.”
Annika brooded, looking darkly outside, as the carriage they were in, on the return trip from inspecting the Tiger land holdings outside the castle, lunged from one side to another.
People stared at the carriage as it went by.
Although it pained her, the castellan was right. The people in the outhouses mostly came to the castle for a season or two before returning to their homes in the country. There was no way she could help everyone. The thought did not improve her mood.
Once she was inside the castle, she went to her father’s office. She sat at his desk, and opened the drawers with her father’s key. It was now her key. That thought felt strange. For a few minutes, she rearranged the papers in neat piles. She could not bring herself to look at them, not yet.
The captain of the guard came in. He had given her only cursory attention when her father was alive. Now, he seemed ill at ease.
While Annika did not want to make the man feel uncomfortable, she did not want to go out of her way to put him at ease either.
The captain cleared his throat and examined the window behind her.
She waited for him to speak.
He asked what arrangements she wished for her security, which was the question he had asked a number of times over the preceding days. It was a question that Annika avoided, not wanting further restrictions imposed on her.
“I have given this some thought,” she replied. “I want the arrangements to remain much the same as when I was a Princess.”
“That will not be possible. As the head of the House, you must have a guard around you at all times.”
Annika laughed, not bothering to contain the bitterness. “The head of a House that no longer exists.”
“There is still yourself.”
“Yes.” She looked at the papers before her darkly. One of the papers seemed to be about the cost of grain.
“And the people at this castle,” said the captain. His voice had changed timbre and softened. “And your other lands. The soldiers, the craftsmen, the peasants. The servants. These people need you.”
Annika looked at him with surprise. She had read him wrong. “I’m sorry, captain,” she said. “You’re right. I’ll have an honor guard. But I still want to—“ She stopped short.
The captain looked at her expectantly.
She thought through what she was about to say. To send yet another search party after Cara, in addition to the four she had already sent? Say that she wanted to leave the castle and find Zak and spend time with him like two normal young people, unburdened with any of the weight of affairs of state? She blushed. None of these things were possible. “Wh
at are the other Houses doing now?”
“For protection?”
“To prevent another attack.”
“Much the same as us,” said the captain. “We have four companies of infantry. Mercenaries, which your father had the foresight to hire. The House of the Ram are fortifying their castle and recruiting six companies. The House of the Bear are recruiting eight…. It is said that there will be no able bodied men to do any of the trades, soon, with so many drawn to arms.”
“What about the Wolves?”
“Now the Wolves,” the captain continued, obviously pleased at the opportunity to showcase his knowledge, “are taking a different tack. They have no need to hire men as they recruit from the depths of their lands on the outskirts of the Great Forest.”
Anika silently listened.
The captain paused for a few moments as though thinking about what he is about to say next. “There is talk that our House’s misfortunes have been the result of the Wolves.”
“How so?”
“The deep coffers of our House are the only power in the Empire that can check their strength.”
“We were on the opposite sides of the uprising five years back,” said Annika.
“That is so,” said the captain cautiously, “but your father was rather more… accommodating with them.”
“Were we seen as too strong together?”
“Yes. If the Tigers and the Wolves were to align, then our combined power would make the two Houses the preeminent force in the Empire. As your highness knows, the five House truce has held for a thousand years. It is based on each of the Houses pursuing its interests independently, without a deeper alignment with any other House.”
“You speak like a man of the pen, not the sword,” said Annika, not hiding her displeasure. “Out with it.”
The captain bowed his head. “Your highness. There have been rumors about you and Prince Zak. It is not my place of such things, but with your father gone, I feel I must. If our two Houses were to be seen as aligned, the other three and the Emperor would have no option but to destroy us.”
“The rumors are false,” she said.
“Forgive me, your highness.”
“You may leave.”
The denial of anything between her and Zak was one of the hardest things she had ever said. It was denying a part of her, while the impossibility of their relationship made her want to dissolve in tears of rage.
Her guard consisted of six soldiers, in full armor, who followed her everywhere she went.
In the first few days, she gave them the slip a few times. But the feeling of behaving like an unruly and undisciplined child in the face of their professional stolidity was uncomfortable. The few moments of freedom gained this way were not worth it, she decided, and she accepted their presence.
Likewise, she accepted the bowed heads of the castle’s staff whenever she walked by, having her hand kissed, and being referred to as “your highness” or “my Queen” by the same people who, a few weeks earlier, would not have stood aside to let her pass in a narrow passage.
It was bewildering.
It was lonely.
She missed Zak more than she could admit to herself.
Lying in bed at night, she thought about the obligations that she accepted.
In her father’s desk there were papers to do with buying provisions, fortifying the walls, hiring more guards, and protecting the Tiger House’s remaining country-side possessions. This paperwork paled in comparison with the documentation that surrounded the money that the Tiger House had lent. This was the true source of the House’s wealth. She could not make sense of it all on her own. Her father’s castellan, captain of the guard, and the priest have advised her constantly, from sun up to sun down.
There was no question of practicing her healing, even as she felt the power occasionally surge through her, seeking a release.
With the facts and figures that the castellan presented, she felt that her head may burst. And yet, lying in bed at night, she did not think about the price of grain or the condition of her men’s swords.
She thought about Zak and when she would see him next.
She had lost her family, her dream of being a healer, and her freedom.
Could she stand to lose Zak as well?
Chapter Eleven
Four weeks after her father’s funeral, Annika, feeling light and uncertain, her heart beating too quickly, entered a large ballroom in the castle of the House of the Wolf.
She had been invited for a ball that started the party season. She had been minded to refuse, but eventually accepted, her distaste for the court life overcome only by her hope of seeing Zak. The time she had spent away from him has been like a sore, bleeding wound that she was unable to reveal. She felt as though all this time she had been wearing a rigid mask.
The ballroom was vast and Annika estimated that it could fit over three hundred people. Women with large fans and tight corsets and men in stiff black jackets circulated the room. The tiles underfoot were fitted in a checkered pattern of engraved white and black wolves’ heads. The walls were covered in round, gold plates, each bearing the name and the date of a battle won by the House’s armies. The glitz and the pomp, however, did not interest her.
She scanned the crowd looking for Zak. Try as she might, she could not see him. She did not know if he would be attending. She hadn’t dared send any messages to him.
After half an hour of fruitless waiting, and after a few desultory conversations, feeling like she could not bear to be there much longer, in desperation, she embraced her power and reached out with it, fanning her heightened senses across the room. It was like plunging into a deep, cool pool. The ripples spread out, and in them she sought any hints of Zak’s familiar presence.
A tall man snuck in through the open door on the other side of the ballroom.
The slight prickling on the edges of her awareness alerted her. She let go of her power, and in the void left by it she felt even more acutely her heart beat quicken and her mouth dry even before she consciously realized that it was him.
Zak.
He approached, making unerringly for her through the crowd.
Her heart felt like it would burst.
He was wearing his courtly attire of a white robe with dark streaks across the chest.
Annika held out her hand for his kiss.
He kneeled. When he looked up, his eyes were hard, with just the glint of a smile playing in its corners.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered, feeling her heart melt for the first time in those long weeks, as he rose after pressing his lips to her hand.
“So did I.”
“What took you so long?” she said, trying to hide the note of pent up frustration in her voice.
“I knew you would be here,” he replied, although he felt her reproach, however gentle, sting. What made it sting even more was that he felt its justness. “I couldn’t make my way to you any earlier. Believe me, I tried.”
“I believe,” she said, and she did.
“We need to speak.”
She nodded and followed him out of the room, at some distance, trying not to make their association too obvious. Even so, she thought she could feel eyes burning with curiosity trail them.
In the corridor, he squeezed her hand, then leaned in closer. His body felt hard against her. Her lips opened for the kiss that seemed to last a lifetime. When they stood slightly apart, she kept her hand on his hip.
“Do we need to be careful here?” she asked.
“No,” he said, calmly.
She looked around. The hallway was abandoned. She hesitated for a moment before throwing her arms around him one more time. This time, her lips sought him out without restraint. She felt herself drawn into him as though into a vortex and, upon pulling away, she found herself gasping for breath.
“No one will disturb us here,” he said. “I needed to speak with you.”
“You don’t need me anymore?” she asked.
“More than ever,” he said, brushing her hair with his hand.
“Why now?”
“I needed to know how you were.”
“Now you do,” she said, returning his caresses.
“You look sad.”
She shrugged. “The life of a queen is one of frustration… I can’t feed all my people, for then we won’t have enough to sustain the castle. I can’t pardon prisoners, for we need to send a message to our rivals. And I can’t see you, lest the other Houses and the Emperor worry about our joined strength!”
That last comment came out loudly and Annika glanced around.
Torches burned at regular intervals around them. Shadows danced. Then, somewhere along the corridors’ depths, she could hear the distant fall of someone’s footsteps.
“I thought you said we will not be disturbed?”
Zak looked displeased. “There are sentries on each entrance. They had strict instructions. Only one of my elder brothers or my father could override them.”
Annika frowned. She had no wish to meet any of the other members of Zak’s House. Zak, she saw as an exception to what she had been told about the Wolves. Meeting anyone else, here, in the heart of the Wolf castle, without her guard, she felt exposed.
“Do not be afraid” Zak said, grimly.
“I fear nothing!” Annika hotly returned, but even so embraced the power.
“If anyone were to harm you here, they would need to kill me first.”
A soft voice carried towards them from under the shadows. “I should hope that it would not come to that, my dear son.”
Stepping around the bend in the passageway was Zak’s father, the head of the House of the Wolf and the new Councilor of the Empire.
Annika felt herself freeze.
The man was a head taller than Zak. He was enormous, filling the corridor almost to the ceiling. He stood there like a dark, powerful cloud, certain and unyielding in its strength.
Annika tried not to shiver.
The man reached out and took her hand and lifted it to his lips with a courtly smile. Annika would have found it difficult to describe his face other than as an indistinct and older shadow of his son’s features. His movements, despite his size, were as smooth as those of his son.