Blood of Heirs

by Alicia Wanstall-Burke

  The fire might as well have been a pile of steaming dung for all the warmth it gave Lidan’s fearful, freezing body. There was no flame in the world hot enough to thaw the dread crawling up her spine.

  ‘If that girl-wife births a boy, he will instantly usurp you. You’re nothing if she has a boy. You will cease to exist.’

  ‘That’s not true! Mam wants Da to have more children! She plans the days—’

  ‘Pah!’ The old woman spat and shook a swollen finger at Lidan. ‘Your mother spends an inordinate amount of time planning and advising your father when to lie with his wives under the guise of helping him put boys in their bellies. She’s trying to stop them! She’s trying to protect you and your future, you stupid girl!

  ‘Do you see the mistake you made in angering her? In constantly defying her? The enemy you’ve made in the only woman who cares for your interests?’ The Crone jabbed Lidan’s shoulder with her bony, twisted finger. It stabbed below her collarbone like a hot knife and Lidan cried out, clutching where it burned. ‘You need to figure out where you stand, girlie. Do you want the future your mother works tirelessly to build, or do you want to vanish into obscurity? Nothing—you’ll be nothing.’

  Pain throbbed up the bone into Lidan’s neck and she shuffled back, staring at the Crone in fearful awe. What was the future her mother wanted for her? The life of a subservient wife to a daari? Or something else? A position of power in the clan that no woman had ever achieved? But if Farah’s child was a boy…

  Her parents’ quarrel replayed in her mind. Sellan warning Erlon to beware the nights he lay with his wives, especially Farah. If Lidan lost her place as heir, what did that mean for the dana? No longer the mother of the heir, she would have to concede some authority to Farah. And when Lidan was matched away to another clan, which she surely would be, then her mother would be left behind. Was that what Sellan feared? A time when her position in the clan became so diminished that she might cease to matter?

  Her back hit the wall and she slid down to the meagre pile of sacks and hay she called a bed. When the dana warned Erlon against ignoring her advice, she implied he risked not conceiving sons, when in fact she was making sure none of his wives bore one and interrupted Lidan’s place as heir. She worked on Lidan’s behalf, and Lidan had fought against her mother’s decisions. It was no wonder Sellan was so furious with her behaviour.

  The Crone set a water pot on the heat Lidan no longer felt and resumed her seat. ‘So now you see—everything she does is for you and Marrit. Everything, and you throw it back in her face with all this talk of horses and becoming a ranger… She’s a hard woman, girlie, but her eyes are only for you and your future. If that’s the only lesson you learn here, see you keep it in mind from now on.’

  Lidan’s shameful heart thumped hard and she hugged her knees to her chest. She was near-sighted and stupid—a daughter who didn’t deserve her mother’s effort and sacrifice. Her mother was trying to secure a future where Lidan didn’t have to leave Hummel—a future that granted her more power and authority than any clan woman could dream of. But if her father conceived a son with Farah as the Crone suspected, and her mother turned her back on Lidan for lack of respect and gratitude, what future did she have?

  ‘How can I fix this?’ she asked and the old woman looked at her with brows raised in surprise.

  ‘There might not be any fixing to be done, girlie.’ She pointed one of those gnarled old fingers at Lidan again. ‘You can’t fix anythin’ once it’s shattered.’

  *

  Sellan didn’t speak to Lidan the day she collected her from the hut. Instead, she tilted her head towards the gate and waited in the doorway as Lidan collected a ragged old shawl the Crone had given her for the colder nights.

  She shuffled past her mother and flinched as the woman’s sharp nails stung her arm, snatched the shawl and tossed it back into the hut before slamming the door. The dana offered no words to the Crone, nor did she address Lidan as they picked their way down the track and came into the village from behind the stables.

  Sellan grabbed her daughter before she could emerge into the common, still quiet in the cold, misty morning. ‘Not a word, you hear me? Not. A. Word.’

  Lidan nodded. She didn’t need further explanation or instruction. She knew exactly what her mother meant and the consequences if she failed to meet the dana’s expectations. After more than a fortnight cutting the Crone’s wood with bleeding hands and sleeping on a pile of lice-riddled furs with only her thoughts for company, Lidan had turned herself inside out with worry. She better understood her mother, in the new light of the Crone’s words, but the revelations were driving her to distraction.

  The scheme her mother had underway to inhibit the birth of a male heir was extraordinary. Yet for all her effort, it might have failed. If Farah was pregnant, there was no telling the child’s sex until it was born. Would Sellan wait to see if her sister-wife had another daughter, or act to prevent the birth altogether? Lidan shivered and hugged her chest, ignoring Behn’s wave and confused frown as they passed the forge on the way to the hall. The Crone had told the dana to stay her hand, but Lidan doubted the old woman’s word would count for much if Sellan got an idea in her head.

  For now, Lidan planned to keep her mouth shut, especially when her mother was near. If the dana discovered she’d been listening to the conversation with the Crone, she had no doubt what her punishment would be. Some things were best kept behind tightly sealed lips.

  She followed her mother into the hall and through the corridors to her parents’ chambers—a collection of rooms reserved for the private business of the daari and only ever seen by the most trusted of the family’s advisors. Beyond a heavy curtain of wool, Lidan heard the gentle murmuring of men’s voices, and her mother held it aside and pushed her through without announcing their arrival.

  She stumbled in and Grent looked up from her father’s chest wound, his hands poised to fit a clean linen dressing as the daari lay on a wide timber bed covered in furs. The bonesetter smiled and quickly finished, collecting his things and leaving them alone. Lidan grinned and her father smiled despite the dark smudges of fatigue around his eyes, lifting his arm and beckoning her closer.

  In a few steps she was beside him, curled under the arm opposite the wound and snuggling against the uninjured side of his bare chest. She refused to cry in case it enraged her mother and made her father think something was amiss, so she focused on the needle-etched tattana lines marked across his chest and down his ribs, tracing them with a finger as she’d done since she was small.

  Daari Erlon shifted a lock of her hair to unveil her face. ‘Where have you been, Liddy?’

  ‘I told you she took ill,’ Sellan answered quickly. ‘She was so devastated by your injury…’

  For a moment, Lidan considered correcting her mother, but instead she nodded and hugged him closer. She didn’t want him to see deceit in her eyes, even if her mother’s lie was for the best. No one needed to know the truth of why she’d gone, and they wouldn’t believe her if she told them.

  ‘Come, child, leave your father to rest.’ The dana’s hand pressed on her shoulder and she allowed herself to be led to the door.

  ‘Sellan, where is Farah?’ Erlon asked suddenly, casually picking up a parchment page from beside the sickbed and feigning interest in the symbols scrawled across it. The hand on Lidan’s shoulder tensed to a hard claw, right above the aching collarbone injured by the Crone, and it took all her determination not to scream at the pain.

  Sellan’s face remained an expressionless mask until finally her lips curved with a slight smile that did not reach her eyes. She bowed slightly to her husband. ‘Your fourth wife is ill with a flux.’

  ‘Kelill came yesterday but wouldn’t say what ails her sister-wife…’ Erlon’s steady gaze settled on Sellan and the grip on Lidan’s shoulder intensified, the talons of the claw driving deeper. As much as she tried to hold still, she began to squirm.

  ‘Farah is very ill and mus
t rest—’

  ‘My wife will be brought to me, ill or not. I want to see her for myself.’ He waved his hand to dismiss them and Sellan guided Lidan from the room. He hadn’t forgotten their disagreement over Farah. The moment of tender happiness Lidan felt when her father held her shrivelled to a hard kernel of hopeless fear.

  Nothing had changed between her parents in the time she had spent confined in the Crone’s shack. If anything, their regard for each other had grown darker and more poisonous. Lidan tried to ignore the quiver in her muscles, and the drive to run and hide. Her mother held her tightly, in ways that ran deeper than the hand on her shoulder, leading her from the daari’s chamber. She would not escape that grip without a fight.

  Chapter Eleven

  Usmein, Orthia

  For more than three weeks Ranoth watched dark grey clouds loom in the north and west, and read the signs foretelling the arrival of the first snow. Those steely clouds announced the turn in the season and they would blow across the Territory leaving a thick blanket of ice in their wake. The days grew short and dark, yet no word came of the duke and the army, despite the gathering storms—not one sentry had made a sighting, nor had any of Ran’s scouts arrived with news of victory or defeat.

  The best view of the fields to the west of Usmein was from the top of the palace, where the roofs of the four wings met and the dome curved into the sky. A long walkway frequented by patrolling guards skirted the dome’s base and offered a commanding perspective of the city and the farmland Ranoth’s people relied on for food. So close to the winter snows, the crops had been harvested and the grain silos under the city stood full and ready, all of it recorded with precision in Alber Frain’s ledgers.

  Ran had ordered the city’s common areas prepared with tents and food stores for the arrival of refugees from nearby towns, if for any reason the advancing Woaden swung away from the main road between the capital and the front. The land between Usmein and the Territory created a natural funnel any advancing army would follow to take the city, and it was sparsely populated for fear the Woaden might one day put a torch to it. Those who tended the land near the city returned to the protection of the walls each day when the sun set. If the Woaden came raging across the hills, there was hardly more than forest for them to raze or pillage. If they got into the city, however, the matter was entirely different.

  A door to Ran’s right opened into the wind, then slammed closed.

  ‘Marshal Gregon said I’d find you here,’ said Brit without preamble. Their shared experience on the road from the front and weeks of working together on the defence of the city had bred familiarity between them that no longer required titles or etiquette. Ran needed Brit’s honest advice, and appreciated it where a number of his father’s advisors treated him like an uneducated idiot. Gregon and Lithor were the only other notable exceptions to the rule.

  Ran lowered his looking glass and gave the watcher a smile. ‘Aye, most days. The view is better here than at the wall.’

  Across the fields, teams of workers laboured with shovels, cranking timber cranes, carts and horses, all struggling against the hard wind to finish Usmein’s defences. From this height the workers resembled tiny game pieces, moving in random, chaotic patterns. For weeks, every hand the city could spare, including women and children, had been working from dawn to dusk. They all pinned their hopes for survival on the wild ideas of their young prince and Ran hoped their faith in him would not be misplaced.

  Brit nodded and pocketed his hands. ‘It’s almost finished.’

  ‘Now it just has to work,’ muttered Ran. Each day he faced down his rising anxiety. His plan had to work. If it didn’t, he’d have the blood of thousands on his hands; such a stain would never wash clean. He tried to smother the thought by changing the subject. ‘What has Gregon got you doing?’

  ‘Scouting for sentry posts, laying out archers’ blinds.’ Brit sounded bored, his voice low and dull, and without a hint of the cheek it had when they met at the front.

  ‘That sounds exciting,’ Ran quipped in an attempt to lighten the mood, but Brit’s frown only deepened.

  The watcher pointed at the western horizon. ‘Not as exciting as that.’

  Ran spun back to the view and peered through the looking glass. ‘What is that?’

  The stupid thing wouldn’t focus.

  The watcher slapped Ran on the shoulder. ‘Time to test your defences. That’s the duke’s guard.’

  *

  Brit followed at Ranoth’s heels, sliding down ladders from the dome until they hit the fourth-floor service corridor. They burst into the long southern gallery, the living quarters of the palace layered below their feet like a cake, all the way down to the servants’ lodgings in the basement. Ran sprinted past a guard and staggered to a stop, thinking better of it.

  ‘Go to the garrison and raise the alarm,’ he ordered the man. ‘The duke returns.’

  He didn’t wait for a reply and ran on. Marshal Gregon would be at the wall, overseeing the distribution of garrison soldiers across the defences. Some were finished and ready to occupy, others half done, but serviceable. There was cold comfort in the unfinished work at least providing a barrier to any Woaden thundering along behind Duke Ronart.

  Ran led on down the stairs, not willing to wait for the lifts to crank all the way up to the fourth floor. When they reached the ground floor atrium Brit gave a high whistle to a group of guards and garrison soldiers at the east wing entrance. They all snapped to attention. ‘Bring your blades, boys! To the wall!’

  Outside they found Chancellor Lithor conferring with several palace officials by the forges. He spun towards the sound of hurrying boots on the palace entry stairs and his eyes widened at the sight of Ran running with garrison soldiers.

  ‘Chancellor, have you a sword I can borrow?’ Ran jogged over and Lithor, still in the unbreakable habit of wearing his blade every day, unbuckled his scabbard belt.

  ‘What have you seen, sir?’ The veteran kept his voice low and helped Ran fit the leather harness to his waist.

  Short on breath, Ran waved towards the east. ‘My father is in the west hills. Now we discover if the Woaden follow behind him.’

  ‘I’ll lock the palace down.’ Lithor waved sharply to his assistant, who darted off to enact the protocols for securing the palace compound.

  ‘Aye, and my mother and the girls?’ Ran said around a ball of fear threatening to choke him. He needed to keep his head on straight and his mind focused—people would look to him to set an example and though they might see a fifteen-year-old, a veteran of one failed command and greener than spring grass, they would not see the Palace Commander snivelling like a frightened child.

  ‘They’re prepared; I’ll get them squared away.’ The chancellor smacked him on the shoulder in a manly sort of good luck blessing and rushed off into the crowd. Bells began to toll in the city’s long Guild Plaza, pealing a call to arms from atop the Silversmith’s Hall.

  There’d hardly been time to spend with his sisters since his return, but he’d not failed to plan for their protection. Ebonie and Nerola were to hide under the palace with the duchess and any of the court not involved in the defence of the city. If the walls fell, they could escape into the mountains. He didn’t know how far they might make it if forced to flee. Marlow to the north was an ally, albeit a reluctant one, but the land between Usmein and Harbern was icy and sparse.

  Ran shut a door on the thought. They wouldn’t need to flee because he wasn’t going to let his city fall.

  He clambered aboard a troop wagon with the last of the soldiers and it passed through the palace gate which shut behind them with a dull boom. Dual steel portcullises, one either side of the two-foot-thick timber gates, fell at an eye-watering rate, clanking loudly as the chains ran unhindered through the winches. They slammed home into thin channels at the foot of the gate, locked in place underground by huge spring-loaded bolts. Now the only way into the palace complex was over the thirty-foot wall, or under a web of stee
l bars buried beneath the foundations.

  The doors and shutters of houses and businesses banged closed, while workers poured through all four of Usmein’s gates from the fields. Mothers rushed to gather their children and secure them in homes built of stone and timber, and Ran wondered how long their walls would hold if the Woaden breached the city. By the time the wagon reached the merchant quarter and trader’s market by the city’s main gate, the streets behind him stood empty.

  Good, he thought. Perhaps they could avoid a massacre if people weren’t running madly through the streets. Marshal Gregon waved from the gatehouse door, ushering Ran inside.

  ‘Are they ready?’ asked Ran, while Gregon led him to the stairs.

  ‘As much as they can be, sir,’ Gregon puffed, taking two stairs at a time up the spiralling stone flight. They exited into grey sunlight, hunched below the rampart and jogged across to one of the thickly barricaded archer blinds atop the wall. The gatehouse door locked behind them; the keepers sealing themselves in with the massive winches, plenty of torches, heavy stones and boiling oil ready for delivery through the murder holes.

  Brit and a team of watchers were stationed in blinds along the wall with their keen eyes trained on the fields through peep holes. An eerie silence fell across Usmein unlike any Ran had ever heard and all grew still except for the flapping of the Palace Command banner. It stood proudly above the wall, the silver shield of his father’s house on a black field, a black sash cutting across the shield to mark the absence of the duke. It only ever flew when the city came under attack, an ebony flag for Usmein’s troops to gather behind in a time of dire peril. It had become Ran’s banner—his standard.

  The city was a veritable ghost town. Even at night it was never so quiet or empty. The thought sent a shudder through him, a reminder of the house of bones, the empty skulls and the girl. His hands began to burn again, tingling and aching down to the bones. His wrists throbbed with heat but this time no amount of squeezing or shaking eased the sensation.