And if another white binder came along?
I made my decision without even a thought. “We should start right away,” I said, my voice barely audible to my own ears.
The queen said nothing, but simply nodded once before carefully doing up the clasps of her dress—the thin thread holding them her only protection from a world of enemies who believed they could take her down when the time came.
I would disabuse them of that notion.
63
The Dutiful Son
A few minutes later Reichis and I walked back to our rooms. The palace hallways still felt strangely empty—the combination of betrayals and reprisals having reduced both the palace guard and the nobility by substantial numbers. It was just Reichis and myself and the occasional potted plant lining the hallway. In an odd way, it made me feel safe.
“This place is giving me the creeps,” Reichis said.
“Really? The only people here are the ones the marshals trust the most. What are you afraid of? Ghosts?” I imagined him standing in front of some ghostly apparition, growling and cussing at it. “No ghost defeats a squirrel cat,” he’d say. I snickered at my own joke until I realised he hadn’t said anything back. “Reichis?”
He was crouching near one of the plants, silently, like a dog who’d peed on the floor and was waiting for a beating from his master.
Crap. I flipped open my holsters. She had given me comfort in my darkest hour. She’d more than likely saved my life at great cost to herself. And yet I knew, even then, that whatever moment had taken place between us, no matter how much she loved me deep down, the yellow-haired girl was gone and the manipulative Jan’Tep diplomat was back. “You can come out, Sha’maat,” I said.
“Whatever do you mean, dear brother?”
I spun around. She was close enough to touch me. “How did you sneak up on me?” I asked.
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Daringly,” she said. “Using dark and devious conjurations.”
I tried to think of what spell might have allowed her to do it, and how only my sister would be so vain as to risk her soul just to make an entrance.
She saw my expression and laughed before pointing down to her feet. They were bare. “Dark magic indeed, dear brother.”
“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your taste for pointless games,” I said. “But I’m surprised you’d show your face in the palace.”
“Oh? But why not? We were completely loyal to the queen during these events. Not one Jan’Tep sided with the conspirators.”
“Not that anyone can prove anyway.”
“More than that,” she said. “My men and my spells helped kill the soldiers Martius left behind to hold the palace. Even now, the Jan’Tep are helping the queen to seek out Martius’s accomplices.”
“And deciding which ones will be caught and which ones won’t?”
She pouted. “Oh, now don’t be cross with me. I’ve come with a reward. Father is pleased with you.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“He gave me a message,” she said. She hugged me and whispered in my ear. “You have honoured your family, Ke’helios.”
For a long time I just stood there. Ke’helios. My father had given me a mage’s name. Why in the world would he do that? What had I done to…Ancestors. The day Sha’maat first appeared at court, she’d delivered his commands: “You’ll learn the queen’s secrets for us and, when the time is right, you’ll kill the countess.”
I’d done precisely what Ke’heops had ordered me to do. Mariadne was dead and the queen had just revealed her deepest secret to me. Had Sha’maat and my father tricked me into doing their bidding? That day, in the cell beneath the palace—had my sister truly been defying Ke’heops to help me, or had it all been another one of her manipulations?
I remained there like a burnt tree stump until she was gone. Reichis growled and got to his feet and we started walking towards our room. “You know something, Kellen?”
“What?”
“I know she’s your sister and all…”
“Yeah?”
“But twice now that bitch has used her skinbag magic to put me to sleep. She’s starting to bug me.”
I chewed on that for a moment. “Me too, partner.”
Reichis paused in the hallway beside a potted plant and pissed against it. “I might need to kill her one of these days, Kellen.”
“I suppose that might be inevitable,” I said.
He started ambling down the hall. There was a little spring in his step. “Come to think of it, we should probably kill all of them, just to be safe.”
“My whole family?”
“Well, yeah, as a start. But think bigger.”
“What? No Jan’Tep at all?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“What about the Zhuban?”
He stopped for a second and scratched his snout. “Nutjobs. We should probably kill them too.”
“Daroman?”
“Yep.”
“Gitabrians?”
“You mean those poncy contraptioneers who nearly sucked my soul out so they could stick it inside some stupid metal dragon? Let’s murder them first.”
“So,” I said, “just you and me then.”
The little squirrel cat looked up at me and grinned. “On an island?”
“We can let some of the islanders live though, right?”
“Sure. We’ll need someone to pour our drinks.”
It was my turn to smile. “And feed you butter biscuits?”
“Oooh, butter biscuits,” Reichis said, as if I’d just invented the wheel. “Hey, do you think they restocked the ones in the baths yet?”
“Only one way to find out, partner.”
We turned on our heels and started back the other way, towards the baths. Reichis gave a grunt. “If there’s another stinkin’ langzier in there, you get to throw yourself in front of it this time.”
I stopped and watched my strange, furry little business partner saunter down the hall as if he owned the place. I would too, I realised. If something or someone came after Reichis, I’d throw myself in front of them.
That thought made me strangely happy.
The story continues in…
CROWNBREAKER
Book SIX of the Spellslinger series
Keep reading for a sneak peek!
Acknowledgments
The Band of Outlaws
Writing can be lonely out there on the long roads, and turning the first spark of an idea into the finished book you’re holding in your hands sometimes feels as risky as trying to steal magic from the gods. Putting together a book is a lot like pulling off a bank heist: it helps if you’ve got the right bunch of rogues helping to crack the safe.
THE BRAINS
“I got a plan, see? A real good one. Gonna make a big score right under the noses of them flat-footed coppers.”
The earliest version of Queenslayer was written before the first four books in the series, back in that more innocent, bygone era of summer 2011. My good friend Eric Torin and I had planned on writing a book together and thus spent countless dinners tossing ideas back and forth, pitching characters and settings, debating who Kellen should be and who he could become. Eric ultimately decided the project wasn’t right for him, but never stopped helping me, listening, reading, and always pressing me to give the stories and characters more depth. One day you’re going to read a book by Eric Torin. You’ll be amazed.
When I look back at 2011, before I had a book deal or an agent, and realise that it was one of a hundred novel concepts I’d made my wife Christina listen to, I’m reminded of just how valuable it is to have someone in your life who treats your idiotic ideas as if each one might be a diamond in the rough. I hope you have someone like that in your life, because I honestly don’t think I’d have become a writer without Christina in mine.
LOOKOUTS
“Gotta keep a close watch, see? One tiny mistake and this whole operation is blown to hell.”
/>
I’m pretty sure I’d make the world’s worst bank robber. I’m terrible with details, leap ahead without looking and, so far as I can recall, I’ve never come up with a decent backup plan in my life. You can succeed that way sometimes, but only if you’re lucky enough to have the right people watching your back.
My fellow writers Kim Tough (kimtough.com), Brad Dehnert (bradleydehnert.com), Wil Arndt (wfgordon.com), Claire Ryan (claireryanauthor.com), and Jim Hull from Narrative First (narrativefirst.com) made me fix all the boring bits so you wouldn’t have to read them.
Kathryn Zeller beta-read the original version of the book, spotting one of the most glaring story problems and prompting me to fix it in a way that made it all so much better. Simone Hay, official arbiter of all things squirrel cat, once again lent her careful eye to the story to make sure Reichis got his due. Nazia Khatun, an actual squirrel cat, helped me make sure that when I smoothed some of the rougher edges in the story I nonetheless kept the dramatic intention behind them.
Felicity Alexander, my kind and eternally patient editor at Hot Key Books, helped me work through some of the most challenging scenes in the book and helped me make sure it fitted properly within the overall series. Talya Baker, as always, caught my endless bits of repetition, endless bits of repetition (hah—didn’t catch that one, did you, Talya?) and brought sparkle and flow to any number of passages in the text where I’d gotten myself lost in mediocrity. Melissa Hyder proofread the novel, and caught every single one of my spleling mistakes.
MASTERS OF DISGUISE
“Quick, put these on. Gotta look the part or we’ll get nabbed for sure!”
How many great books don’t get a chance to find readers just because the covers aren’t right? The answer, in my particular case, is none. That’s because Art Director Extraordinaire Nick Stearn steers the design process, leading artists like Sam Hadley on the covers and Sally Taylor on those gorgeous Daroman outlaw cards inside the book itself. Jamie Taylor then takes all those pictures and text and carefully crafts them into the book you’re holding in your hands.
SAFECRACKERS
“You wanna bust in there? That place is locked up tighter than Fort Knox! Nobody can crack that safe. Nobody!”
Well, actually, somebody can. In the case of Spellslinger it was my wonderful agents (aka blackmailers) Heather Adams and Mike Bryan, whose reputation for the putting the right book in the hands of the right publisher meant that Mark Smith, then CEO of Bonnier Zaffre, and Jane Harris, Director of Hot Key Books, not only bought the series but gave it the kind of support authors dream about.
GETAWAY DRIVERS
“Pedal to the metal, everybody! We gots ta get the diamonds outta here before the coppers arrive!”
Scoring the perfect heist isn’t worth a thing unless you can get the goods into the right hands. The inexhaustible Bonnier Zaffre sales team keep on convincing bookstores to carry the series. If you’re reading this book in a language other than English, it’s because the indefatigable Ruth Logan and Ilaria Tarasconi found the perfect publishers for it in your country. Those publishers, in turn, selected the amazing translators who transmute all my idioms and stylistic quirks into your language.
The scariest thing about being an author? You can do all that—have all those amazing people helping bring your book to life—and still have it fall flat. That’s because books only thrive when the folks working in bookstores happen to read them and recommend them to their customers, when journalists and bloggers take what precious little time they have and devote some of it to your book and, most of all, when readers discover something they love and share it with friends, family and colleagues. So thank you, each and every one. You’re a damned fine bunch of outlaws!
THE NEXT HEIST…
As I write these rather lengthy acknowledgements, I’m also busily preparing Crownbreaker, the sixth and final book in Kellen’s journey. Crafting a six-book fantasy series in which each story has to be complete in itself and yet inextricably part of a greater whole, and set in a world filled with different peoples, cultures, magic systems and no end of intrigues, is exactly as hard as it sounds. Only two things keep me going: the first is the ineffable delight of making something that, if I do my job well, is both entertaining and meaningful. The second is my anticipation of putting that final book in your hands in hopes that you enjoy it as much as I do.
In the meantime, you can reach me at www.decastell.com and @decastell on Twitter. I’ll always be happy to hear from you.
Sebastien de Castell
January 2019
Vancouver, Canada
Discover Your Next Great Read
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.
Tap here to learn more.
extras
meet the author
Photo Credit: Pink Monkey Studios
SEBASTIEN DE CASTELL is the author of the acclaimed swashbuckling fantasy series The Greatcoats and the Carnegie Medal–nominated Spellslinger. His debut novel, Traitor’s Blade, was shortlisted for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy, the David Gemmell Morningstar Award, the Prix Imaginales for best foreign work, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He spends his time writing, traveling, and going on adventures. Visit him at www.decastell.com.
if you enjoyed
QUEENSLAYER
look out for
CROWNBREAKER
Spellslinger: Book Six
by
Sebastien de Castell
Chapter One
The Card Trick
The old man dealt me an ace. Again. I picked it up and let it fall face up next to the other ace and two jacks in front of me. One edge of the card landed on top of a piece of ancient, dried-up food stuck to the table and lay there, tilted towards me as if pointing out the obvious.
“Two jacks, each with an ace,” I said. “That’s a pair of spearmen.”
The old man leaned forward, long brown greasy hair and beard framing a crooked smile. He waved his arms in the air to show he’d just been swept up in unforeseeable circumstances.
“Lost again, haven’t I?” He looked around the room as if he was performing for an audience. But the place was empty except for one drunk, snoring in the corner, and the bartender, doing a piss-poor job of wiping down the bar. The old man turned back to me and let one hand fall to the table while the other motioned for the bartender to pour more ale into mugs that weren’t any cleaner than the bar was.
“You don’t seem to be too good with cards,” I observed.
The old man smiled again. He had perfect teeth. Filthy hair, shabby robes, thin as a rake. His feet were covered in sandals that reminded me of those strip shows you see where the dancers spin bits of cloth around their bodies as they flounce around the stage; you couldn’t call them naked, but they’d catch a chill if they went outside. But those teeth? They were so straight and clean you couldn’t help but wonder about the rest of him. A glance at his hands revealed fingers that had no calluses and nails that were neatly trimmed.
“Can’t help but wonder why a lord magus would walk into a saloon and start bleeding money at cards,” I said, glancing at the pile of coins on my side of the table. I’d started the night with just one.
The old man shrugged. “Perhaps I’m above such petty concerns as money.”
“Maybe,” I said, taking a swig of my beer. “Then again, maybe it’s because you don’t mind watching me move coins from your side of the table to mine all night, since you don’t plan on seeing me walk out with them.”
The mage gathered up the cards and started shuffling again. “They told me you were clever.”
“Be sure you thank them for the compliment.”
He dealt another hand of country holdup. Four cards each. Only face cards counted.
I picked up my hand. All four cards were twos. The old man had dealt me an eight-legged horse. Guess he wasn’t planning on letting me win this time.
“So that’s how it’s g
oing to be?” I asked.
“That’s how it’s going to be.” Just like that, the smile was gone, and so was the pretence. “You’re going to die tonight, Kellen of the House of Ke.”
“Reckon you have me confused with someone else, friend.” I dropped the two of chariots on the pile at the centre of the table. The old man dealt me another card, which turned out to be another two of chariots. Nice trick.
“You reckon, do you?” He gave a chuckle. “You think that preposterous frontier drawl of yours can mask who you are?”
Now that was just mean. I’d practiced my drawl all morning to get it just right.
“No running away this time, Kellen,” the old man went on. “You are who you are, and I am who I am. You’ve got yourself a little magic and a few tricks, but you’re no mage.”
“Never said I was.”
The old man laughed. “No, of course not. What is it these Daroman barbarians call you? The ‘queen’s spellslinger’?”
“I believe Her Majesty prefers the title ‘royal tutor of cards,’ actually.” I dropped the scholar of trebuchets on the pile.
“‘Her Majesty,’” the old man repeated in a mocking whine. He spat on the table, making it neither dirtier nor cleaner. “That little bitch has pissed off the wrong people, Kellen. But she’s too well protected, so they’ve sent me to teach her a lesson by making an example of you.” He snorted, apparently taken unawares by his own cleverness. “I suppose that makes me her ‘royal tutor’ now.”
“Can’t see as how I’m going to make much of an example, friend, seeing as how, like I told you, I’m not this Kellen fellow you’re looking for.”
Queenslayer Page 36