‘I have escorted her Grace and the Tutor Master to the chamber, as requested, sir.’ Harkon opened the door and Ronart strode through, the guards peeling off to stand by the entry.
Ran stopped at the threshold and swallowed hard. He didn’t want to go in, to face his mother and teacher, to see their eyes when they realised the muck on his arms was another person’s blood, or their horror when he explained the mage-girl’s death. He certainly didn’t want to hear about what would happen next, or face the questions that would be thrown at him, because deep in his heart, he already knew the answers.
‘Ranoth Olseta, get in here before I have those guards strap you in cuffs!’ The duke roared and Ran grimaced. He glanced through the door to see his mother standing by the fire and his old tutor in black robes, his bald head reflecting the firelight.
‘Ronart, there is no need—’ Duchess Merideth began.
‘There is every need! Ran, get in here and shut the bloody door!’
Ran slipped through the entry and stood no more than a few feet inside the chamber. High windows reached to the ceiling on the far wall, bathing the chamber and its fine furnishings in cool evening light. Candles and a large hearth offered plenty of warmth, illuminating the wide-eyed anxiety in his mother’s face and the barely controlled rage of his father.
‘What is this about, Ronart?’ Merideth spoke quietly, her blue eyes trained steadily on her husband. ‘You should be congratulating Ranoth for his exceptional defence of the city, not frog-marching him through the palace like a criminal!’
‘That remains to be seen. The Woaden had a mage; one who rode in from the front and nearly tore the city apart. She toppled a section of the wall and we only just pushed them back through the gap before they realised more than half their number were dead and retreated. She was derramentis—one of the young exiled ones.’ The duke pointed a finger at his son. ‘He killed her.’
‘He did what?’ The duchess’s gaze snapped to Ran, and the duke crossed his arms with a nod and stared at the fire. ‘Oh, may the White Woman save us…’
‘Indeed…’ Ronart turned back to Ran.
‘Mother, Father; I’m sorry…’ Ranoth rubbed his aching head with the palm of a trembling, bloodied hand. He’d encountered the term derramentis before, but only briefly, in treatises on the Woaden and their penchant for encouraging magical abilities. What he could remember was fractured by his fatigue, his limbs heavy and his spirit spiralling down under the weight of his parent’s regard. They stared at him in silence for a long moment, neither moving nor speaking, the duchess’ eyes welling with tears. Ran’s breath caught like a fishbone in his throat, strangled by the sight of his mother’s sorrow. His heart hadn’t slowed since the fight, hammering in his chest, skipping anxious intermittent beats and thumping back into time with a sickening lurch that made him gasp.
Ronart’s frown deepened and he paced slowly towards Ran. ‘You know of the mages, Ran—you know what they can do. You know they cannot be killed from any distance with a spear or arrow. That’s why we have the cutters, to get in close and sever their spines. But you killed that mage with your bare hands.’
Tutor Perce cleared his throat. ‘Your Grace, there is one other way to kill a mage, derramentis or otherwise: draw off their magic.’
The duke nodded and continued to study Ran sternly. ‘How does one draw off a mage’s magic, Tutor Master?’
‘Only another magic-wielder can draw power from a mage, your Grace.’
The duke turned back to Ran. ‘Now, Marshal Gregon said she came after you on the wall? Threw you off into the house?’ Ronart continued without waiting for an answer. ‘Then you appear holding her mangled corpse, claiming to have killed her. She’s still got her head on her shoulders, albeit barely, her spine still attached to her skull. You’re not trained to make the kill with a knife, and clearly haven’t decapitated her; so I’m left with only one possible scenario to entertain.’
Silence filled the chamber, broken only when the duchess sniffed back quiet tears. The sound cut Ran through to his soul, burning as it did, searing him from within. The duke took to a chair by the fire, black and embellished with silver and grey. He didn’t offer a seat to anyone else.
Perce remained beside the hearth’s mantel, pale eyes carefully watching Ran under bushy white brows. It was impossible to read the old tutor’s expression, an impassive mask fixed firmly in place, never revealing a hint of his thoughts before he meant to. With his hands clenched in fists to stop them shaking, Ran stood across from his father. The duke leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together.
‘How did you kill her, Ranoth?’
Ran’s eyelids slid shut and he swallowed the fear welling in his throat. ‘I… I deflected her magic and tackled her. She tried to fight me off but I was too heavy. I got my hands around her neck and…’
‘You cracked her skull?’ asked the duke softly.
‘Yes,’ Ran replied, eyes closed. The scene replayed in his mind, one gruesome moment at a time.
‘What happened to her neck?’ The duke probed.
‘I don’t know…’ he shook his head, the repeating vision of the event blurring and shifting, unclear despite the memory being fresh in his mind.
‘Your Grace, if I may?’ Perce interceded. ‘Prince Ranoth, how did you survive the mage’s magic?’
‘I put my hands up and imagined a wall between us. When I looked up, she was coming back to her feet, as if recovering from a fall. Her robes were all tattered.’ Ran frowned as he recalled the fight. ‘I don’t know how, I just did it…’
‘And her neck? What happened there?’ Perce continued, his voice closer, approaching slowly across the fine hand-woven carpets before the fireplace.
‘I held her down and my hands… My fingers went through her skin…’ His eyes opened to see his mother, hands gripping her gown, with the tracks of tears down her face. Her distress was palpable and Ran’s heart skipped a painful beat. Tutor Perce appeared and put an ink-stained hand on Ranoth’s shoulder.
‘Was there energy? Did anything pass between you when your hands touched her skin?’ he asked. When Ran nodded, Perce turned to the duke and duchess and gave them one solemn nod, then returned to his place by the fire. ‘Prince Ranoth used magic to defeat the mage, sir. The wounds you describe are consistent with a mage drawing power from another without consent.’
A sob escaped Duchess Merideth and her arms wrapped across her chest. The duke sat back and sighed, looking at his battle-scarred hands. Perce stared at the fire, and for a long while no one uttered a word. Ran glanced at them, searching for a friendly face in the gathering, but found none. He was alone here, cast adrift like a ship torn from its moorings by a vicious summer storm.
Ronart finally growled into the silence, ‘Well, he didn’t get it from my family—’
‘How dare you level this at me!’ Merideth snapped at her husband. Ran wished he could sink into the floor.
‘The Olseta line was cleansed of magic and you know it, woman!’ The duke stood and paced across the room.
‘Ha!’ The duchess turned, her eyes rimmed red and lips curled in a savage sneer. ‘Cleansed? You’re as bad as the Woaden, with their pathetic ideology of fine-bloods and black-bloods. You can’t cleanse a family of magic, it’s written in who you are, by the gods no less! It’s not up to you or any of your ancestors to decide who is born with or without it!’
‘I’m afraid her Grace is correct, sir,’ Tutor Perce bravely interjected. ‘Magic can return after generations without any direct links to another practicing mage. Ranoth may simply be unlucky.’
‘Unlucky, my arse!’ Ronart rounded on his son and approached with lightning speed. Ran didn’t have time to back away. ‘What happened to you, boy? When did this start? How long have you been hiding it?’
‘I haven’t hidden anything!’ Ran cried, glancing desperately at his mother for assistance. She stared helplessly then averted her eyes as though the very sight of him pained her. �
�I… When I came home from the Territory, the watcher and I sought shelter in a house not far to the north of the road.’
Everyone turned and stared at Ran. Their gazes bored into him like hot pokers, their scrutiny unwavering.
‘What house?’ the duke murmured, the colour draining from his face.
‘A small farmhouse, a full day’s ride from the front. The watcher insisted we keep moving, but I wanted to stop. I went to the house thinking the owner might lend us a bed for the night.’ He looked at the three adults and frowned at their expressions of increasing horror. Had they heard of the house before? ‘What we found was unexpected…’
‘Prince Ranoth, did you go inside the house?’ Perce asked in the serious, low tone he used for delivering grave tidings, typically of Ran’s awful performance in grammar exams. Ran nodded to his tutor and Duke Ronart slumped into the nearest chair, the duchess covering her mouth to stifle another sob. ‘And your magic began to stir after this?’
‘Yes, Tutor.’ When no one responded or elaborated, Ran decided there was hardly a better time than the present to bring up the name Brit Doon mentioned on the last day of their journey. ‘The watcher told me to ask about Lackmah?’
‘Fucking Lackmah, all right…’ Duke Ronart spat the words and put his head in his hands. ‘I should’ve burned it to the fucking ground.’
‘Father, please, I don’t understand!’ Desperate for answers, Ran’s resolve broke and his eyes filled with hot tears, stinging and blurring his vision.
The duke didn’t answer. Instead he went to the door, muttered something to the soldiers outside and then stood back as all four of them entered.
‘Ronart?’ Merideth’s eyes darted among the soldiers. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The law is clear, wife.’ The duke lifted his chin and held Ran in a steely gaze. ‘Escort Prince Ranoth to the dungeons.’
‘NO!’ The duchess screamed and a soldier leapt to catch her as she dived at Ran. The other soldiers rushed him and he threw a frantic glance at his mother as she vanished from sight.
‘Mother!’
‘Don’t do this, Ronart!’ Merideth’s pleas echoed through the room as the first of the soldiers got Ran’s arms in his grip. He spun in the circle of armoured bodies, ready to fight them off. His muscles fired and he felt a tiny flicker of magic spark, then die. The power that flared to life on the ramparts failed to ignite, and he was left with nothing but flailing hands and unsteady feet.
‘Ranoth!’ His mother cried from somewhere behind the wall of guards.
A fist crunched into his nose and the room plunged into darkness.
Chapter Fourteen
The palace dungeons, Usmein, Orthia
Ran’s neck ached and the back of his skull smarted as though it had been hit with a forge hammer. Pain lanced forwards to a place between his eyes and spread its burning tendrils through his face. His nose throbbed cruelly each time he drew a breath through his cut and bloodied lips, and the swelling under his cheek bones pressed against the underside of his eyes.
He opened one eye and found there was little point to the exercise, so shut it again. There was hardly a sliver of light to be seen, just a murky glow off to the right. It was enough to see the dark smudges of prison bars and the slick sheen of the slimy stone floor, but it revealed no other features. Under his head he felt the reeds strewn across the ground to soak up moisture and excretions, but thanks to his blocked and swollen nose, he couldn’t smell how long it had been since they were last changed.
He lay in a heap, his father’s words floating through his head.
‘The law is clear,’ he’d said.
The law was clear, or more specifically, a single part of it—the part kept in the massive volumes that were under lock and key in the library. It was the part that detailed the Duke’s Justice for anyone of age found to harbour any magical ability. An image of what awaited him flashed in his mind, and if he’d had anything left in his shrunken, painful stomach, he would have thrown up again. Terror shivered through him and he clenched his fists against it.
Lackmah…
The name echoed in his head, and his thoughts chased the trailing sound down a dark hole. Brit had known that name, and so had Perce and his parents. Was it the house of bones? Why hadn’t he heard of it before now?
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside his cell. Curiosity forced his eyes open again, and he immediately regretted it as a flaming torch rounded a corner and bathed the cell in bright light. It felt as though someone had thrown hot coals in his eyes and he slammed them shut against the scorching pain. Ran groaned and tried to turn his head from the offending light, but only succeeded in twisting his already painful neck and making his suffering worse.
‘Oh,’ Perce started and shuffled back several steps. Ran heard the old man mount the torch in a sconce and hurry back, his robes whispering over the floor. ‘I am sorry, your Grace. I should have known your eyes would be terribly sore.’
A stool scraped across the corridor and the sound screeched through Ran’s head like cat claws on glass. His tutor sat, and for a moment blessed silence filled the cell.
‘I brought you some bread. It was all I could get past the guards…’
Ran’s stomach growled and forced him to crawl towards where he last saw the cell bars, despite the agony in his face. A small loaf of bread pressed into his outstretched hand and he drew it to his chest, wishing for the first time since he woke that he had a sense of smell.
‘How long…?’ he croaked in Perce’s general direction.
‘A night and a day,’ the tutor replied with a sigh. ‘They are waiting for you to wake.’ He sounded resigned, disappointed and weary, as though he hadn’t slept an hour since Ran was locked under the palace.
‘Mother?’ Ran asked as he tore a small chunk of bread from the loaf and set it in his mouth to dissolve. His jaw didn’t have the strength to chew yet.
‘The duchess is… coping.’ Perce didn’t sound convinced of his own words, which gave Ran no comfort.
He hadn’t seen his mother’s face before the guard’s fist crunched into his nose, but he would remember her cries until his dying day. He curled around his bread with a painful moan and tried not to think about the terror in her voice.
‘Ranoth… Ranoth, listen to me, boy.’ Perce’s voice dropped to a whisper and Ran heard him shuffle closer to the bars. ‘I don’t have long, so you really must listen. The guards think I’m here on orders from your father, but…’
This piqued Ran’s interest. He turned to the tutor’s voice, years of slogging through lessons training him to heed the man’s words.
‘The duke doesn’t know I’m here, but I told the guards you need to be tested. I told them I need to collect evidence for your trial.’
Ran managed to lift his head and squint towards Perce. The old man was a hunched shadow on a low stool, huddled close to the bars, his face pressed between them as he hissed his secrets into the half dark. ‘When I call them, they’ll come with the key, shackle you and hand you over to my custody. I’ve told them I’m taking you to your father for a few hours. It’s all the time I could buy.’
‘I don’t…’
He wanted to tell Perce he didn’t understand, but he did. Deep in the foggy recesses of his beaten brain, he knew what the tutor planned. He wanted to tell him not to bother, not to take the risk, but the old man was already on his feet and turning towards the torchlight. The dome of his bald head shone as he leaned around the corner and shouted, returning when heavy booted footsteps replied to his calls.
All Ran could manage was a groan before a pair of guards appeared with another blazing torch and blinded him. He didn’t see them open the gate in the bars, but he felt their gloved hands heave him from the floor and hold him steady as an icy pair of manacles were clamped around his wrists.
At the exit of the cell, the guard handed Perce a guide chain, linked to Ran’s manacles by a thick lock. ‘You reckon you can manage him on your own, Mas
ter?’
‘Oh really, dear boy,’ Perce affected a tone of distinct distaste. ‘Look at him—he can hardly stand upright. He’s no more threat than a new-born kitten.’
The guards gave a chuckle and marched off down the corridor, leading Perce and Ran towards the massive steel doors at the dungeon entrance. Unlike the city prison, the palace dungeon was mostly empty, reserved for insubordinate soldiers of the garrison and the odd circumstance where a criminal might be caught within the palace walls. It was still a freezing, filthy place Ran would be glad to see the back of, but at least it wasn’t filled to the brim with rotting convicts and lunatics.
‘When will you have him back?’ A guard shuffled in behind a desk with a wide ledger book spread across the table top and dipped a quill in ink. Ran squinted but couldn’t read the scrawling script through his puffy eyes.
‘In a few hours, but don’t panic if I take longer,’ Perce’s hand tightened on Ran’s arm as he swayed, the hallway spinning at a sickening rate with his blurred vision. ‘These things can take a little more time if the subject is, shall we say, unwilling.’
‘Be careful, Master Perce. You’ve heard what he did? Used his curse to draw the Woaden right up to the gates.’
‘Oh, I heard,’ Perce gave Ran a shove in the back. He stumbled out into a subterranean passage and slammed into the opposite wall. ‘Black Prince indeed…’
*
Despite his advanced age, Tutor Master Perce Crofter moved with the swiftness of the north wind. His black robes billowed behind him as he hurried Ran through the maze of passages under the palace, all pretence of stealth abandoned. He stopped periodically to check around an approaching corner with his torch, then returned and urged Ran on. Ran’s head began to clear as they moved, the stuffiness in his nose and face receding enough for his eyes to focus on the path ahead. His head still throbbed as though a hundred angry men were drumming on his skull, but he could at least see and keep up with the older man.
He assumed their travels took them away from the dungeon complex, but to where and in which direction, he couldn’t tell. He’d never had the time nor the inclination to explore these tunnels, despite knowing they were here. It was this very maze he intended for his mother and sisters to shelter in if the Woaden breached the city, though he hadn’t expected he would use them to flee just days after the attack.
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