Kublan wrapped himself in his robe and took a seat on the marble bench. He sat upright and jutted his chin at the counselor striding toward him.
The Raven was less than half his age and taller by a hand. His hair and brows were thick and dark, but his slight beard was tightly trimmed. He held the king’s eyes with his own. They were the color of moss flecked with gold. Catlike. His lips were perpetually set in a wry smile that hinted of untold secrets. As always, he was fashionable and elegantly dressed in clothes he had designed and which had been created from costly fabrics and hand-tooled leathers. He wore a cap that sported feathers as black as the bird after which he was named.
Orsis-Kublan both admired and envied the man who strode toward him. He admired the man’s confident deportment. It reminded him of himself—the man he had once been. A man with the hubris, arrogance, and courage to challenge a king. The courage to kill a king who needed to be killed. The thought rarely came without a shiver of guilt. He envied his counselor’s youth, and though the Raven was hardly a young man, he had his health. Death was not on his heels.
“What great sign of the sky is more important than my bath?” Kublan bellowed as the Raven crossed the room. There was a curious affection in his blustering in spite of the scolding sharpness of the question.
Though the Raven’s position of influence had increased greatly from his early years as the king’s personal astrologer, the Raven continued to read the king’s horoscope almost daily.
“The signs continue to speak to your good fortune, m’lord king,” the Raven said, lowering his head in respect. “You are Leo, sign of the sun.” He narrowed his eyes as if gazing into the night sky in search of signs. “You have absorbed its light and brilliance and are imbued with its strength, supremacy, and glory.”
A murmur of adulation rippled among the girls.
The king smiled, allowing the flattery to soak deeply into his consciousness.
After a moment, the Raven added, “There is a matter of such urgency I am compelled to violate the seclusion of your chambers. I beg your wisdom and guidance on this grave matter.”
Grave matter? The perpetual knot in the king’s stomach tightened.
“You may judge me harshly if you must, but hear me first, gracious lord.”
The king was pleased by the formalities, though both he and the Raven understood the game they played. “Speak to me as my friend, Raven! By the gods, I know you too well to be charmed by such sycophancy.”
“As you will, Orsis.” Both men briefly smiled, then the Raven’s expression grew grim. “A march of kingsriders has been attacked. Many have been slaughtered.”
“Slaughtered? There is no force that can stand against my elite warriors. Punish the fool who told you such a lie!”
“It is from the lips of one of our own. The news he bears must be spoken for your ears. We have brought him, but he is near death and will not last the hour.”
“Would you have me parade thus through the halls of Kingsgate?” The king opened his robe without a blush. His body was surprisingly firm for his years in spite of the droop of pallid skin.
“No, m’lord,” the Raven said, averting his eyes. “The wounded kingsrider is at the door, and upon your nod he shall be carried in.”
Orsis dismissed the girls of the spa. Tonguelessone lingered in the shadows, her eyes fixed on the king’s favorite concubine in the adjacent parlor. Maharí rubbed oil on her long legs and feigned disinterest, but her ears were tuned to the voices echoing from the spa.
The king closed his robe to cover himself and nodded to the one man he trusted. “Bring him in.”
The Raven crossed to the door and opened it. Four men of the kingswatch shuffled into the room with the wounded kingsrider on a litter. His armor had been removed, but the broken shaft of the arrow remained in his neck. None had dared take it out. Pushing the spike through to cut the point away might slice an artery or cut his windpipe. Pulling the point against the notched ears would tear a gaping hole in his flesh. He would bleed out what little blood he had left.
The warrior’s eyes were open. His knees rose and fell on the litter in a vain effort to kick away the pain. Juice of the poppy had not yet dulled his senses.
“Speak to your king,” the Raven said as the wounded man was laid on the marble slab at the edge of the pool. Blood soaked into the thick fold of linen. The king scowled. The cloth would have to be burned to ensure he not be tainted by common blood.
The kingsrider’s voice was weak, his words choked by the blood in his throat. “Mighty lord. . . . We have failed. . . . The bandit . . . our march. . . . Men slaughtered. Every man . . . put to the ax unless . . .”
The king looked to the Raven, his brow pinched with the question.
“Unless what?” the Raven asked.
“Who are you?” Kublan demanded. Without armor or shield, the man bore no mark of his rank.
“Ablon, m’lord. . . . Archer.” The warrior choked and his body stiffened. His voice faded.
“He is a kingsrider from the march of Captain Borklore, your grace,” a man of the kingswatch said.
“Borklore?”
“The march I sent to apprehend the roving bands of robbers and to protect travelers on the King’s Road,” the Raven said.
“He enticed us. . . . Tricked us. . . .” The wounded man became more lucid as the opium floated him above his pain. “Ambushed.”
“What manner of rogue can beguile a seasoned captain of kingsriders into such folly?”
“Drakkor. . . . Blood of the Dragon,” the man slurred.
“He told you his name?” Kublan’s face twisted with the snarl of an animal backed into a corner. He scowled at the Raven. He had heard the rumors of a ruthless bandit, but the name Drakkor meant nothing to him. It was the other name that caused him to shudder with fear. “Blood of the Dragon! Was killing every man of your march so easy he had time to introduce himself?”
The kingsrider’s words were lost in a gargle of blood. He shook his head.
“Then how can you be sure it was him?”
“He forced the captain speak his name before . . .” He arched suddenly as if a knife had been thrust up through the stretcher from below.
“Before what?” The Raven gripped the man’s hand, his knuckles white.
“Before he cut off his head,” the wounded archer managed to say.
“What of the others?” the Raven asked.
“All were slaughtered or—”
“Or what?” Kublan demanded, stepping closer.
You need not fear, lad,” the Raven said in a soothing voice. “Your loyalty is proven well.”
“Slaughtered or . . . surrendered.”
“Surrendered?” The king gasped. “You lie! My kingsriders are sworn to fight to the death. How could this bandit and his drudge of thieves massacre a march of the king’s finest warriors or force them to surrender?”
“He was merciless, great king. More savage beast than man.”
“But you were armored and armed and . . .” The king’s face went dark at the thought of such betrayal, and his frail frame began to quake. “How many cowards ran from the battle like you?” He gripped the man’s tunic and half lifted him before the Raven intervened by laying a gentle hand on the man’s chest.
“He promised us a world . . . like the world of ancient days and to make us . . . free men!”
“Free men!” Kublan’s scoff was full of scorn. “Free from what?”
The archer was almost beyond conversation. The blood on his neck was clotted black. “A sorcerer . . . the seed of evil,” he muttered, reaching for the last of his strength and failing. He lay still, his eyes open and staring.
The blood drained from Kublan’s face.
“Ablon! Ablon!” The Raven shook him, then placed his ear against the warrior’s chest. “He is
dead.” As he lifted his head, he saw the markings on the broken shaft. It was stained by blood and fouled with dirt, but there was no mistaking the sigil of Kublan. The arrow had come from the bow of a kingsrider. The dead man on the slab of the king’s bath had been killed by one of his own.
“By the gods!” Kublan shouted. “This cannot be so. My elite captain beguiled and ambushed, and now his own men fight against me? I shall hang the traitors by their ankles and keep them alive until birds pluck out their eyes out and their flesh rots from their bones.” He whirled and pointed a trembling finger at the men of the kingswatch. “Are there traitors among the kingswatch as well? Schemers who conspire with my enemies behind my back?”
“These men are not traitors, your grace.” The Raven calmed him with a hand to his shoulder. “If there are traitors among the men of the march, they are few. Impotent fools with egos bigger than their brains. Fewer than five. Of that you can be certain!”
Even as he spoke his soothing words, the Raven’s eyes returned to the markings of the arrow. Lying to the king was increasingly necessary. The line between what was best for the king and what was expeditious for the Raven was increasingly blurred.
By what persuasion had the man who claimed the blood of the dragon been able to twist the minds of men? By what power did this bandit turn brother against brother until they were willing to murder their own?
A cheap magician’s trick? Or was he more than a rogue and a bandit?
Seed of evil and sorcerer were the words slurred out in the man’s dying breath.
The Raven knew little of the dark arts of thaumaturgy, but icy claws dragged uneasiness from the bottom of his spine to the top of his head. He must never trouble the king with the possibility that the bandit, Drakkor, was an enemy with powers of the unseen world.
CHAPTER 16
Ereon Qhuin covered his nose and mouth with a wrap of coarse linen to keep the dust from choking him.
Beyond the Narrows southward, the red dirt of the King’s Road was ground into a fine powder that billowed up from hooves and wheels in a dirty cloud that filtered the sun to a glowing smudge. Qhuin felt imprisoned by the thick, dark air, but at the same time, he experienced a strange sense of freedom.
He turned his head and squinted into the plume of dust. The rearward guard of kingsriders could not be seen, which also meant that they could not see him.
Qhuin drove one of five chariots at the end of a procession of horses, riders, wagons, wains, and coaches. It was the hunting expedition of Kadesh-Cor, Baron Magnus and prince of Blackthorn, grandson of His Greatness, Orsis-Kublan, Omnipotent Sovereign and King of Kandelaar.
The cortège was traveling south to the Tallgrass Prairie, the vast grassland west of the Ophidian Swamps and north of the mysterious Oodanga Wilds. They were hunting wild tarpan, the legendary horses that sometimes came north and crossed the Swamps of Dead Men to graze in the lush meadows.
Qhuin drove a chariot, drawn by three coursers abreast. The horses were the color of sour milk. In the red dust they were more pink than white. It was uncommon for coursers to be trained to draught, but the chariot was lightweight, made for hunting and designed for speed. Unusual as it was to see coursers pulling a chariot, it was far more uncommon for a man of Qhuin’s caste to be at the reins.
A’quilum Ereon Qhuin was a slave. As a bondsman in the Blackthorn stables, he trained the milk-whites to harness. The expedition to the Tallgrass Prairie was the first time he had ever been beyond the gates of Blackthorn for more than a day.
A’quilum was a designation, not a name. It meant “a man of unknown blood”—a curse worse than being lowborn. Qhuin knew nothing about who he was or where he’d come from. He was still wet from birth when he had been abandoned in a wrap of homespun wool in a basket left on the stone steps of a blacksmith’s cottage in Village Darc more than twenty years before.
Qhuin was taller than most men with wide shoulders and narrow hips. His body had been hardened by the rigors of servitude and the life of a slave. His hair was black as a moonless night. His nose was broad and straight between the prominent bones of his cheeks. His skin was the color of weathered bronze, but his eyes were blue. Ethnic origins and a mingling of blood? A connection to the indigenous peoples of the ancient past? He didn’t know and never would, so he left such speculation to those for whom lineage and the color of one’s skin mattered so dearly.
Leo Rusthammer, the blacksmith of Blackthorn, had found the abandoned baby boy. Having no wife nor female kin and without the slightest notion of how to care for a child, Rusthammer took the baby to the Baron Magnus of Blackthorn, who those many years before had been Tolak, firstborn son of His Greatness, Orsis-Kublan.
Rusthammer delivered the basket and the baby still wrapped in the homespun wool. He described the strange circumstance by which he’d found the tiny child but told no one about the curious stone he discovered nestled against the child’s cheek. Nor did he say anything about the strange premonition he’d experienced when he’d lifted the boy from the basket.
Lord Tolak’s new wife, Katasha, was pregnant with her own first child and insisted the abandoned infant be taken in and given to the care of a kitchen maid. The woman’s own child had died at birth only days before, and her breasts were swollen with milk. She nursed the babe, loved him, and raised him as her own in the servants’ quarters of Blackthorn.
It was only in vague dreams that Qhuin remembered her. How warm and safe he felt when cuddled in her soft, plump arms. The smell of her—a blend of sweet and sharp. Hot baked bread and steaming broth. Blackberries, herbs, and onions. Her breath was sweet as if she’d nipped a bit of honey from the combs before they had dripped dry.
Qhuin was seven years old when Tolak was exiled by his father, and Kadesh-Cor was made Baron Magnus and prince of Blackthorn. And everything changed.
His adoptive mother seemed to know what was going to happen, and in the days that followed the king’s decree, she held him longer and kept him closer and slept beside him through the night. Singing softly. Talking. Crying.
“Do you know how much I love you?” she asked. His answer was to snuggle in her arms. “Whatever happens, you must never forget you are loved and that love can make you strong.” She drew him closer still. “You must be brave and patient. The winged spirits of the God of gods are watching over you.” She held his face between her hands. “Sometimes the bad things that happen to us turn out to be good things, and sometimes we must pass through the dark before we can come into the light.”
It was only years later that Qhuin understood what she had meant.
The morning following Tolak’s departure, two large men dressed in black came to the kitchen. One wore a long cape. The other had a molded leather breastplate with a scabbard and short sword strapped to his hip. They looked like the men who came to Blackthorn when Master Tolak went away.
Qhuin had seen them gathered in the courtyard from the window of his sleeping loft above the pantry, but he had never seen a soldier so close. He was excited by their presence in his sheltered world. His excitement turned to terror when the larger of the men put a heavy hand on his shoulder. Qhuin twisted away, ran to his mother, and clung to her legs. She shuffled him into the pantry. The loud voices of the men were demanding and angry. His mother blocked the pantry doorway with her body and cried. The man with the leather breastplate struck her in the face, then pushed her, and she fell. The man in the cape gripped Qhuin’s arm with a crushing fist. As much as it hurt, it was the pain in his heart and sight of his mother on the stones of the kitchen floor that he remembered most.
Though he was not yet seven years old, Qhuin was given to keeper of the stables as a slave. He saw the woman who’d been his mother only once after that. She came to the barns and peeked at him through the wooden slats of the outer wall. When he saw her, his heart leaped with joy and he ran to where she was hiding. Before he reached her, she turned and hu
rried away. He remembered the sound of her sobs being swallowed by the noise of the stables. Like smoke from a blacksmith’s fire swirling into nothingness, the memory of her was faint and far away, except for the dark dreams when the two men in black came again to haunt and frighten him.
Rusthammer had seen the orphan boy from time to time before Lord Tolak was exiled. When the child was given to keeper of the stables, he offered to look after him. “Toughen him to the labor demanded of a bondsman,” he offered. On that day, the blacksmith of Blackthorn became Qhuin’s mentor, teacher, friend, and, in the years that followed, the closest man to a father Qhuin would ever have.
It was Rusthammer who named the boy Qhuin, which meant “wise” in the old language. He sheltered the child under his wing and tutored him in secret. In truth, what Rusthammer offered was much more than a wing. It was an enormous, protective shelter arching over the blacksmith’s curious world of fanciful ideas, creations, and contraptions. Rusthammer opened the boy’s mind to ideas and wonders he had never imagined. Qhuin huddled beneath the blacksmith’s sheltering wing as often as he could.
The cluttered shanty adjoining the blacksmith shop became a magical place for Qhuin. He learned to read and found endless fascination in Rusthammer’s collection of books and parchments, kept in secret in the massive trunk of oak and iron. His education at the feet of the blacksmith was so personal and of such depth it likely exceeded that of a princeling.
Beneath Rusthammer’s wing, Qhuin was free in spite of the sigil of Kublan branded onto the inside of his thigh when he was a child and in spite of the iron ring that was put around his neck when he became a man.
CHAPTER 17
“Where is my son?” The king interrupted the Raven, who was speaking before the great chair in the chamber of counselors. The Raven held his tongue with a patient smile. He knew the king, and he knew his place, but most of all, he knew how to hold the king’s favor.
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