The Shadowed Throne

by K J Taylor

  And now she was discovering that the diary matched its creator, as in between dull accounts of the day-to-day duties of rulership, she found hidden pieces of insight. Sometimes, even in the middle of some dry description of law-making and finance, the text would take a sudden turn into something that read almost like a confession.

  The only hard part was finding it.

  However, Laela wasn’t just going through the diary to indulge herself. If Saeddryn now had the same powers her father had had, then the more she knew about them, the better. And nobody could tell her more about them than Arenadd himself.

  So she leafed through the pages, listening to snatches of different entries, searching for the knowledge she needed. The only trouble was that Arenadd himself seemed reluctant to write about them, as if his “condition,” as he called it, frightened or upset him too much. Or maybe he just didn’t think about it much. Or, Laela thought suddenly, or maybe it had occurred to him that someone else might read his diary one day, and he didn’t want that person to know too much.

  Keep goin’, she told herself. He didn’t tell yeh all his secrets right away when you knew him. Why would he start now?

  She turned another page and listened to his voice yet again.

  “Caedmon left Malvern today, along with Shar. I don’t think he plans to return any time soon. It was my fault in a way, but maybe it’s better this way. A few weeks ago, I wrote about poor Sionen. The girl was half my age, but she loved me all the same. I suppose since I looked like I was her age, it made no difference to her.

  “After she died, Caedmon confronted me. I could tell that he had been crying. He was mad and wild; he screamed at me and outright accused me of murdering Sionen. He had been secretly in love with her himself, the poor fool. He didn’t have to tell me that. His claim upset me, and I flared up in response. I think that if he weren’t afraid of me, he could well have attacked me on the spot. In the end, Skandar drove him away.

  “After that, he avoided me for a long time and didn’t return to his lessons with me until I commanded him to. When we began to practise combat, he lost his head. He was never able to land a blow on me, and I think it had always secretly made him angry. And now that he believed I had killed the woman he loved, he went mad. He snatched up a real sickle and came at me. I honestly think that he really did want to kill me. I quickly disarmed him, and he responded by attacking me again, this time with his fists. In the end, I knocked him down and sharply reminded him of who I was and what the consequences of his actions could be.

  He stormed out without a word, and, today, I was informed that he has left Malvern for parts unknown. I know perfectly well that he hates me now; most likely he also left because he thought I might have him arrested if he stayed.”

  Laela listened to all this, wide-eyed and fascinated. She had never met Caedmon and didn’t know that much about him. Iorwerth had hinted that he’d fallen out with Arenadd, but what she was hearing now was far more serious than she had ever imagined.

  “What a terrible mess my family has become,” Arenadd’s voice continued. “First Saeddryn, and now this. I had put all my hopes in Caedmon; when I look back through this journal, I see constant references to how proud I was of him and how much progress he was making. He was my apprentice, my heir. I always told him that if anything ever happened to me, he would be King, but what he didn’t know was that I had secretly planned that one day, when I thought he was mature and ready for it, I would abdicate the throne in favour of him. I may be immortal, but I know I can’t rule forever, and Caedmon could have been a great ruler.

  “As it is, now that I know he won’t forgive me and come back to finish his training, my plan is ruined. I have publicly destroyed the documents naming him as my heir, and so far I have not chosen a replacement. But I hinted to Saeddryn that if I found no Taranisäii worthy of that position I could choose someone outside my own family. Great leadership is not an inherited trait, and simply being a Taranisäii is not enough to make someone worthy of Kingship.

  “Saeddryn, of course, is not pleased with me at all. She thinks I am losing my touch—and possibly my mind as well. The woman is impossible. Maybe I shouldn’t have made her High Priestess; she spends far too much time worrying about what the Night God thinks and wants and doesn’t have the humility to just ask me. I think it annoys her that I won’t take a more active role in the Temple, but in all honesty I have no use for religion. Let the imaginary version of the Night God comfort ordinary people; only I have touched her, and only I know how cold her skin is. Her love is even colder. I may not know much, but I do know that the only kind of love a human being needs or truly benefits from comes from other humans.

  “How can someone so cut off from us, so unable to understand what really drives us, how can someone like that know us well enough to love us properly?

  “Oh, Caedmon. You’ve let me down. You’ve let us all down. If you only knew how disappointed I am in you. If you only knew how much like a son you felt to me.”

  Laela closed the book thoughtfully. No insight into Saeddryn’s powers, but plenty of insight into the sad state of the Taranisäii clan. No wonder there had been so much coldness between Saeddryn and Arenadd. And no wonder someone had tried to assassinate him. So far, there was no proof that the assassin had been sent by Saeddryn or anyone in her family, but if they weren’t behind it, then she, Laela, would eat her own boots.

  She put the diary aside. “Who would’ve thought big families could get so complicated? Thank gods I got a sensible upbringing.”

  Thinking sadly of her foster father, she made for the door.

  Someone had propped a chair under the handle.

  Laela’s neck prickled. She turned, looking around quickly. There was nobody else in the room, and the only other entrance led into Oeka’s deserted nest. She went in there, but there was no-one in there, either.

  “What the—?”

  She went back into her own room, and there was the chair, innocently blocking anyone from opening the door. Nobody else had come in, and if they had, there was no way they could have left again. And Laela definitely hadn’t put the chair there herself.

  Her hand went to her belt, where she had taken to keeping her father’s sickle.

  It wasn’t there.

  Laela searched frantically, but the weapon was nowhere in sight, and she would surely have felt it fall out of her belt.

  “All right,” she said aloud, straightening up in the centre of the room. “This ain’t funny. Come out, whoever yeh are. Don’t make me come lookin’, because when I find yeh, I’ll kick yer teeth in.”

  Silence.

  “Oeka?” Laela ventured. “Are you playin’ games with me again? I told yeh not to. C’mon, this ain’t funny.”

  No reply, and nothing moved.

  Sensing danger, Laela went toward the door to remove the chair. As she reached out to touch it, something slammed into her side-on. She fell hard, and before she had a chance to get up, her attacker was on her. A hand grabbed her by the hair, wrenching her head sideways, and as she threw up a hand to defend herself, pain split her wrist.

  Pure fighting instinct took over. She kicked upward with both feet, hitting something that lurched away and, moving with a speed that astonished her, she rolled away and got up.

  Half-crouched and ready to attack, she paused for the fraction of a heartbeat to look, and saw something that put ice into her blood.

  Saeddryn. Saeddryn, snarling and savage in a way that made her look horribly familiar. Saeddryn, black-clad, holding Arenadd’s sickle, her dead eye exposed and vile.

  In the instant Laela saw her, she knew that she was looking at death.

  But the half-breed Queen was made of sterner stuff than that.

  She hurled herself toward the door and wrenched the chair away, turning in the same movement to swing it as hard as she could. Saeddryn, already behind her, ga
sped as a leg hit her in the stomach. Winded, but not seeming to care much, she rushed in to attack.

  Laela had not had much practice in fighting. But what she did have was the tavern-brawling, rough-and-ready, improvised combat that came from her foster father Bran, and from her own, unsophisticated, tough spirit. She had been made to punch faces and kick groins, not dance with a sword, and it worked perfectly well.

  She put her back against the wall and used the chair as a combination of weapon and shield, blocking the sickle and keeping Saeddryn out of range by jabbing her in the face with the legs. When Saeddryn came in low to attack under the chair, Laela smashed it over her head.

  Saeddryn fell onto her face and scrabbled away, crying out in rage and pain. Laela came after her, not giving her any room to move, and began to kick her, stomping on her hand so hard that she felt bones break under her boot. Saeddryn screamed and lost her grip on the sickle, and Laela snatched it away.

  But Saeddryn was not finished yet. She rolled sideways, and vanished into the shadows.

  Panting, Laela darted over to the fire-place, where the light was strongest. Blood had run down over her hand, making the sickle sticky in her grip. She wiped it quickly on her dress. “Come out, then, yeh withered bitch,” she growled. “I’m ready.”

  “Ye shouldn’t have done that,” Saeddryn’s voice said. It came out of nowhere and sounded hollow and chilly.

  Laela spat on the carpet. “Why, ain’t yeh happy? Yeh wanted to be like Arenadd, didn’t yeh? Now yeh got broken fingers just like him. Lucky ole you.”

  Saeddryn said nothing. She didn’t seem keen to come out of the shadows.

  Laela thought fast and decided her best bet was to keep her busy so she couldn’t come up with a plan. “You sure yeh wanna go up against me, Saeddryn? After what I did to the last one of your sort? You wanna know what really happened to Arenadd?”

  Silence.

  “I killed him,” said Laela, which was more or less true. “Yeah, that’s right. The stories are true. I killed Arenadd. Real nasty, it was. After what I did, all his bones broke an’ he started bleedin’ until he turned white as snow. I stood there an’ watched him die. Horrible way to go, but he deserved it. Is that why yer here, then? Did yeh wanna go out the same way? Well? Do yeh?” She sneered.

  “That’s enough,” Saeddryn said at last, icy as her predecessor. “Don’t try an’ fool me, half-breed. I know the truth. Ye have no power. Yer nothin’ but a peasant brat my cousin pulled out of the gutter to amuse himself.”

  “That’s rich, comin’ from you,” Laela shot back. “’Cause I heard some story about you being some peasant from a tiny village in the middle of freezin’ nowhere when you was my age.”

  Saeddryn stepped back into the light. “I’m a Taranisäii,” she said. “My blood is pure.”

  Laela made a rude gesture at her. “Yeah, well, you can take yer fancy breedin’ an’ shove it where the sun don’t shine. Now, are yeh gonna come get me or what?”

  Saeddryn charged. Laela had prepared herself while she hurled her insults, and now she lunged forward, holding the chair out in front of her, intending to push Saeddryn back with it and trap her against a wall or the floor.

  But Saeddryn had done with fighting like a mortal. In mid-run, she dove head first—straight into Laela’s own shadow.

  As Laela turned, trying desperately to defend herself against an enemy she couldn’t see, the chair twisted and tore itself out of her hands, so powerfully it made her arm give an audible crack. The sickle, which she had tucked into her belt again, was yanked out by an invisible hand. Unarmed, she kicked out blindly and hit nothing.

  Something hit her on the back of the head so hard, it made coloured lights explode in her eyes. She stumbled and recovered, but then another blow came, and another, and after that the fight was more or less over. Cuts appeared on her arms and shoulder. A stab-wound opened in her forehead, making blood run into her eyes. She tried desperately to fight back, wrapping a hand around her throat to protect it. But how could she hit an enemy she could not see—an enemy who was impossibly fast, impossibly strong? Saeddryn pressed in on her, slicing up her hand, then grabbing her wrist, wrenching it away to expose her throat.

  Laela shoved at her, and screamed. “Help! Help me!”

  And then Saeddryn screamed. The hand holding Laela’s wrist let go, and as Laela staggered away, she saw her enemy fall out of the shadows and onto the floor, where she began to writhe and tear at herself. She screamed again, garbling meaningless words, then got up and began to run around the room, smacking into the walls and furniture as if she couldn’t see them at all. Near the archway that led to Oeka’s nest, she stopped and began to bash her head on the wall, over and over again.

  Bleeding and shaking with shock, Laela stared. “What the—?”

  Do not be afraid, said a voice in her head.

  Laela started. “Oeka!”

  The illusory image of the griffin appeared in the middle of the floor, wavering a little before it stilled and became more solid. You are hurt.

  Laela ignored her and looked toward Saeddryn. The old woman fell to the floor, sobbing incoherently. “What in the . . . ?”

  You have nothing to fear from her now, said Oeka.

  “What did you do to her?” Laela exclaimed, unable to look away from the awful spectacle.

  Struck into her mind, said Oeka. I have unbalanced the part of her that tells her where she is. She cannot tell what part of her life is happening now; she is lost in her own past and cannot escape.

  Laela blinked slowly. “Uh . . . what?”

  I have driven her insane, Oeka said dispassionately.

  As if that were a signal, Saeddryn got up. She was shaking, and her eye bulged with terror, staring straight at Laela.

  Do not be afraid, said Oeka. She cannot see you any more.

  “Right.” Laela ran to the door and opened it, yelling for the guards. They came running through the audience chamber, where they would have been able to see and stop any normal intruder. When they saw the blood and wounds on the Queen’s body, they looked shocked. “Milady!” one said.

  Laela pointed back into her room. “Grab her, yeh idiot,” she snapped.

  The guards, well trained, entered and made straight for Saeddryn. As they approached, however, she seemed to wake up in some way. She turned and ran straight through the nest, staggering this way and that. Laela ran after her, along with the two guards, but they were too late. Saeddryn reached the ledge outside and stepped off it into the void.

  Gone.

  Off in Skenfrith, Heath sauntered along a corridor in the upper levels of the governor’s tower, humming a tune.

  In all his life, he could never have imagined that something like this would ever happen to him—and he had a very good imagination.

  His goals in life had always been simple. He loved money. But more than that, he loved power. Not the sort of power that came from governing others, though. No, Heath enjoyed a more subtle kind of power: the power of knowing what other people didn’t and the power of making them believe whatever he told them.

  Heath was a born liar. He was also very clever, and he knew it. He’d noticed that he was smarter than everyone else when he was a boy, and from that moment on his brain had become his favourite toy.

  The thing was, as he had discovered, a lie didn’t have to be completely believable for people to believe it. It could be as outrageous or preposterous as you wanted it to be. The real trick wasn’t coming up with something plausible; it was making people want to believe it.

  And so Heath had created his own personal credo, and it had served him well. Dress neatly, always smile, and be confident. Dominate with confidence. That was his motto, or would have been if he’d ever bothered with mottoes. He never had, though. So-called “real” work was for suckers; Heath had the gift of making people do whatever he wanted
them to, and, for the last ten years, he’d swaggered happily through life, taking what he wanted and somehow managing to be admired for it.

  Even now, it hadn’t changed.

  And they’d caught him! They’d kicked his door down and hauled him off to prison, and he’d begun to think that maybe, just maybe, the game was finally up. But he kept smiling anyway, kept on treating the world as if he owned it, and even as a newly minted convicted criminal, his faithful credo had kept on working.

  Forget punishment; even in the face of being mutilated for life, he’d turned the situation to his advantage. Now he was living in a griffiner tower, mingling with some of the most powerful people in the city, and even if he wasn’t allowed to leave, nobody dared lay a hand on him. Not now that he was one of Lord Caedmon’s friends.

  Making friends with the young griffiner had been easy. The man was obviously feeling isolated, and no wonder, and in his situation, a friendly face and a cheerful voice was just what he needed.

  And then there was that very attractive young woman who worked alongside him. Heath’s smile widened slightly at the thought of her. Lady Myfina, oh yes. Watching her with Caedmon was a lot more amusing than it should have been. Heath kept wondering when Caedmon would finally stop making a fool out of himself and just tell Myfina how he felt. Much longer, and Heath might just get tired of waiting and have a try for her himself.

  Chuckling at the thought, he reached the door he had been making for and opened it.

  Caedmon looked up as he entered and greeted him with an open smile. “Heath! Hello! What are you up to?”