Crowns of Rust (Kingdoms of Sand Book 2)

by Daniel Arenson

  For a long time, Hanan spoke, and Epher listened.

  My kingdom, fallen.

  Epher fell to his knees.

  Koren and Atalia, taken captive. Maya missing.

  His heart seemed to shatter.

  My father, dead.

  Epher wanted to remain strong. He wanted to stand tall, to raise his chin, to nod, to speak proud words, vowing vengeance. But instead he wept.

  My world is gone.

  The tears flowed, and his body shook. Vaguely he was aware of Olive kneeling at his side, stroking his hair, whispering soothing nothings into his ear.

  Hanan placed a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Epher. I loved your father dearly. My heart breaks. I must ride on now—ride on to find Maya, to bring her home. Will you join us?"

  Epher looked up through his tears, not knowing what to do, where to go.

  "Maya has always spoken of seeking a Luminosity teacher." Slowly his hands curled into fists. "And I know who would have spoken to her of such things. Keep riding, Hanan, but I cannot go with you. I travel to Beth Eloh. To speak to the only lumer there. To Avinasi."

  SENECA

  He stood on Pine Hill, watching Porcia approach, and felt his world burn.

  Fire. Fire, hot, all consuming, flared inside Seneca. His hands curled into fists. Hatred. Pure, unadulterated hatred. It blazed inside him, tightening his chest, squeezing his head.

  She still rode in the distance, but even from here, Seneca knew that his older sister was smirking at him, mocking him, planning ways to grind him into the dirt.

  The fog of booze dispersed. His fury burned it away. He stepped into the villa, grabbed his armor, and strapped it on. He fastened his gladius to his side. He ran a hand through his hair and stepped back outside.

  "My prince?" Ofeer said. "You seem frightened."

  He glared at the girl. The half-breed stared back at him. There was something different about her this morning. Burying that brute Jerael had placed a defiance in Ofeer's brown eyes. She was still beautiful—achingly so—with olive skin, long black hair, taunting lips, her body slender yet curved. For three days now, she had lain in bed, meek, barely alive as he took her again and again. Something about the new boldness in her eyes, her wakefulness from stupor, set Seneca's blood boiling, made her even more desirable than before.

  He wanted to take her again. To strip off her dress. To fuck her right on Jerael's grave. To make her always his, to show her who he was, to conquer her, to break that defiance in her eyes as he had broken the city of Gefen. That was what conquerors did. They took something fair and they broke it.

  "I'm never frightened," he told her. "I'm a conqueror." He drew his sword. "My sister will learn this. Stand back, Ofeer. I'll protect you from her."

  He turned back toward the east. Porcia was closer now. Two hundred horsemen or more rode behind her. Her lumer rode at her side, that pathetic, sniveling little wretch named Worm. They all wore armor and bore spears and swords—aside from the lumer—and the hooves thundered. Soon they reached the villa, spreading across the hill.

  "Baby brother!" Porcia called from her horse.

  She dismounted and walked toward him. The princess wore a breastplate of dark iron. While his breastplate bore golden filigree, hers was bare of any ornament, no finer than a beggar's chamber pot. She pulled off her helmet and shook free her waves of chestnut hair.

  "Nice place you got here." Porcia looked around, nodding appreciatively. "Lovely little country villa. Some beautiful flowers for you to sniff. A beautiful girl." She glanced over at Ofeer. "Nice tits on that one. Did you stick your cock between them yet?"

  "What are you doing here?" Seneca snapped, stepping toward his sister. "Father told you to invade from the north. The west is mine."

  Porcia raised her eyebrow and patted his cheek. "My, my, baby brother. Such a temper. You always did have a tantrum whenever I played with your toys. Here." She reached into her pack. "I brought you a new toy to play with."

  She slapped something red and wet against his chest.

  "Gods!" Seneca screamed, stepping back.

  A severed manhood slid off his breastplate and thumped onto the grass. Ofeer covered her mouth and fled into the villa. Porcia only laughed.

  "What?" Porcia gave him a cockeyed look. "You've always loved playing with your own cock. I figured I'd bring you one back from the war."

  "Get this shit out of here!" he shouted at one of his men. The legionary nodded and stepped forward, wincing as he lifted the gruesome gift. Seneca spun back toward his sister. "Porcia, I've had enough of your rubbish." He felt his eyes stinging, and he refused to let himself cry, refused to let her see his turmoil. "Get out of here. Now! The coast is mine. I'm going to tell Father."

  Porcia laughed. "Oh, please do, baby brother. In fact, let us 'tell him' together. I've come here so we can sail back home, you and I, brother and sister." She slung an arm around his neck. "We'll tell Father how you conquered a little house on a hill, spending your days drinking and whoring, while I conquered Beth Eloh."

  Seneca shoved her off him. "You did not. It hasn't even been a month since you invaded Zohar. That city's walls soar a hundred feet into the sky. They're wider than a man is tall." He trembled with rage, with terror that she was speaking truth. His eyes stung anew. "You're a fucking liar. You couldn't have conquered that city within a month."

  "A month? I only needed a day, sweet brother." She patted his cheek. "Do you know how Aelar grew great? How we subjugated the land of Nur, how we rule every port around the Encircled Sea, how one city—Aelar, a mere city!—rules the known world?" She leaned closer to him and licked her teeth. "Because we make deals. I made the rat king an offer he couldn't refuse. I disposed of one enemy—no more troubling than a flea on a dog's ass—and in return, he gave me a city. But, oh . . ." She glanced down toward the city of Gefen, which nestled the sea a league away. "I suppose wasting three legions trying to smash the walls of a little seaside town—walls that will be quite costly for the Empire to repair—will impress Father too."

  Seneca's hands trembled. He needed a drink. Damn it. He needed more wine. Porcia seemed to vanish before him. Corpses danced in his vision, stripped of skin, dripping blood—the battle reanimated, taunting him.

  For nothing. For nothing. Blood for nothing. Their skinless faces split into grins. You invited us in, for nothing, nothing but bones.

  "You lie!" Seneca screamed, drawing his sword.

  This wasn't supposed to happen. Porcia was supposed to exhaust her forces in the northern hills, then to languish outside Beth Eloh, the princes' hosts grinding at her, wearing her down, until he—Seneca Octavius, the Eagle of Aelar—marched in with his legions to capture the city and deliver her from death.

  Porcia sighed and looked at the fallen goblet in the grass. She stepped back toward her horse and mounted it. "I'll be taking a ship back to Aelar. I left a few good men in Beth Eloh to run things while Father names me his heir. Do feel free to stay here drinking and whoring, though. It does seem to be what you're best at."

  With that, Porcia dug her heels into her horse and rode on, trampling over Jerael's grave on the way to the sea. Her men followed, their horses leaving their steaming waste across the garden.

  Seneca stood for a moment, staring after them. He realized that he had strapped his armor on wrong, using the shin guards on his forearms. No doubt Porcia had noticed.

  For nothing. For nothing.

  Again those corpses danced.

  His eyes dampened with tears.

  I lost. I should never have lingered here. Father will grant her my inheritance.

  His world seemed to burn around Seneca. He needed more wine. He needed to pound those ghosts out from his head. He needed Ofeer. Head spinning, he stumbled into the villa.

  OFEER

  She lay in her parents' bed, knees pulled up to her chin, listening to the horses' hooves fade outside. She screwed her eyes shut, and she bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.

  "Please le
t me wake up," Ofeer whispered. "Please, God. Let me wake up, let this all be a dream."

  How could this be real? How could her life have shattered? How could this terror be true?

  "I want to go back." Tears burned down her cheeks like rivers of fire. "I want to go back to how things were. I'm so sorry, God. I'm so sorry for everything I did. For hating my family. For running away. For joining the eagles. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Please let this just be a dream. I want to go back."

  Ofeer trembled. She thought back to how she had been years ago, when she was very small. Sometimes at winter nights, the thunder would boom, and she would get frightened. She would run through the halls of this house—it had seemed as large as a palace then—and leap into her parents' bed. She had not then known that Jerael wasn't her father. She had only known that she loved them, loved the burly man with the thick black beard, loved the kind woman with the long braid and wise eyes. Ofeer would nestle between them, and they would dry her tears, and she would sleep here—in this very bed—comforted by their warmth. She had known then, cuddled between them, that nothing could hurt her, no thunder in the sky, no waves from the sea, no monsters in shadow.

  And yet monsters had come here. The waves had washed over their city. And now they were gone. Jerael—dead. Her siblings—kidnapped. Her mother—lost in Beth Eloh, maybe dead, the city fallen.

  And my true father is the emperor. Ofeer thought back to her mother's words, later confirmed by Taeer the lumer. Seneca and Porcia battle for their inheritance, and I'm their sister.

  She thought back to how Seneca had fucked her, again and again, here in this very bed—the bed where she had sheltered from thunder between her parents. He did not know who she was. To Seneca, she was nothing but an exotic beauty of the east, a concubine, but when Ofeer thought back to what they had done here . . .

  She stumbled out from the bed. She made it to the window just in time to vomit outside, a twisting, wrenching thing that emerged from her with a horrible sound, the inhuman sound of a beast, squeezing her innards with a demonic force. She felt as if a demon had possessed her.

  Finally, drained, Ofeer wandered through the house. She grabbed a jug of wine from a table—wine was everywhere here these days—sloshed it in her mouth, spat it out, then drank. Drank again. Drank more than she had ever drunk back in her wild youth in the port. She walked through her home. In the dining hall, where Ofeer had spent so many evenings with her family, praying and laughing and singing, legionaries were playing dice on the table. In her old bedroom, a legionary was bouncing a city whore on his lap.

  She found Seneca in the library. He stood silently, his hand against the wall, head lowered. Shelves of scrolls rose around him, and mottles of light passed through burgundy curtains.

  There he is, Ofeer thought, staring at him. A scared boy. A murderer. A monster who murdered the man I had once thought of as a father. My half brother.

  Seneca did not look at her as he spoke.

  "When I was very young, Porcia once caught me playing with one of her dolls," he said, voice soft. "Just a little wooden soldier with a blade of real iron. She broke my arm. As I screamed on the floor, she only laughed, and she told me that I would never be a soldier, that I would always be weak, as weak as little Valentina. My arm still hurts in winters. I don't think it'll ever stop hurting." He raised his head and looked at Ofeer, and she saw that tears filled his eyes. "I thought that if I came here to Zohar, if I proved myself in battle, if I won Father's legacy . . . that the pain would end."

  "Some pain never ends," Ofeer said, thinking of the pain between her legs, thinking of the pain in her heart, of that vision she could not erase. Jerael hanging on the cross. Crows eating him.

  "I wanted to be a warrior, Ofeer." He stepped toward her and held her hands. "But I'm a coward. I . . . I saw things in the city. Things you can't imagine. Men burned, the skin peeling, but still they lived, screaming. I can still hear those screams. Organs spilling. I saw a legionary tear the heart out of an enemy and hold it up as a trophy. I saw a man with no legs running from fire. He ran on the stumps before a javelin tore him down. I don't know what I will be when I return to Aelar. Not a conqueror, just . . . something broken."

  "You are a conqueror," Ofeer said, her own tears dry now, staring into his eyes. "You conquered the coast. You conquered me. You saw men killed, but oh, sweet Seneca . . . how many of them you killed yourself! You nailed Jerael to the cross and left him to rot. My sweet, sweet Seneca. You've always been a conqueror. And you've always been broken."

  He stared at her, eyes narrowed, as if not sure if she was complimenting or mocking him.

  "What do I do now?" he whispered. "Tell me, Ofeer. Tell me. I'm scared. If Porcia becomes empress . . ."

  Ofeer looked around her at the library, the place where Maya had loved to spend hours reading until Mother forced her to bed. She thought about the legionaries in her bedroom. She thought about the graves outside. She thought about Beth Eloh fallen, the city of Gefen destroyed. She thought about her old dreams, when she had stood at the port, gazing west, dreaming of Aelar, of that land of towers and heroes and endless joy, the land of her father.

  Zohar holds nothing for me now. Our house has fallen. My family is scattered, maybe all dead. She took a shuddering breath. It's time to follow my old dream. It's time to go home.

  "You return to Aelar." She touched Seneca's cheek. "You tell Emperor Marcus all that you did here. That you breached the thick walls of a fortified city and claimed it, street by street. That you conquered the port—the last port in the Encircled Sea that Aelar had not yet ruled. That you proved yourself in battle, seizing many slaves and treasures. All while your sister simply struck a deal with a fat, drunken king who had sat upon the throne when she got there, and who still sits there now." She wrapped her fingers around his arm. "You tell your father these things, Seneca Octavius, without tears in your eyes, without fear in your voice, but with a raised chin, with squared shoulders. And you take me there with you. We sail to Aelar. Together."

  ATALIA

  "Let me out of here, you piss-guzzling sons of pigs!" Atalia thrashed against her chains, screaming, ignoring the pain of her wounds. "Let me out and face me like men, you cock-loving whores! Put a sword in my hand and fight me, or you're nothing but cowardly dogs who piss on walls!"

  She panted, weak with weariness. Nearly four hundred other galley slaves filled the ship around her, chained to their posts, clad in rags. Some were ragged and scarred from many beatings—slaves who had rowed the ships here. Others had been captured only days ago in Gefen; Atalia recognized many of their faces. She kept trying to peer to the back of the ship, to seek Koren, but no matter how many times she called his name, she heard no answer.

  It was dark here, the ceiling low above them, and no portholes broke the hull. The only light came from the narrow holes the oars slid through. The place was crowded. The knees of the slave behind her hit her back. The slave at her side pressed against her, their elbows banging. Hundreds of rowers, crammed here like worms in a rotten apple, and they hadn't even left port, not during all the three days Atalia had languished here. The place stank of sweat, shit, blood, and disease.

  "Let me out!" she cried again. "Wall-pissers! Let me out!"

  An overseer lolloped her way, a beefy man with a bald head and wide belly. He grinned, a missing tooth gaping in his mouth, and looked at the sticky floor of the ship. "Looks like you're the one pissing all over now." He lashed his crop, and the leather slammed into Atalia's back, tearing the skin. "Now be silent. Another word from you, and I'll beat you till I'm cracking your spine."

  His crop lashed again, and Atalia roared with pain. Her hands tightened around her oar. More than anything, she wished she could tear this oar free, could kick off the chain that bound her ankle, could swing the wood as a weapon and kill the overseer, kill them all. But the bald man merely trundled off, seeking another slave to subdue.

  "It's no use, Atalia," said the galley slave at
her side, the one who shared her oar. "Save your strength for the journey. I heard the men say we'll be leaving port soon."

  She turned her head to glare at the fool. Daor was a young man, only a year shy of her own nineteen summers. Dark stubble covered his face, and the marks of whips lined his back—many of those originally aimed at her. Chains bound his ankle to the floor. They sat together on a wooden slat, the space so constricted their bodies pressed together, sweat mingling in the heat. Back in Gefen, he had served in her phalanx. A potter's son. A young fool.

  "You will refer to me as 'Commander.' You are still a soldier of Zohar." Atalia squeezed his arm—painfully, she hoped. "Is that clear?"

  "The war is over," Daor said. "We lost. We—"

  "—are still warriors. Are still lions." She bared her teeth at him. "And I'm still your military commander. This war isn't over until every last Zoharite is dead underground or under the sea."

  Inwardly, Atalia winced at her choice of words.

  My own father is dead.

  She lowered her head, jaw tight. She couldn't stop seeing it in her mind. Seneca Octavius, smirking and drunk, swinging his hammer, driving the nails into Father's hands and feet, nailing him to the cross. She couldn't stop seeing all the dead, the thousands of them, soldiers who had fallen around her in Gefen. Perhaps Daor, this young fool, was the only other soldier left. Perhaps all of Zohar, from the port to Beth Eloh on the mountains, had fallen, and perhaps all her family was dead.

  I will find you someday, Prince Seneca Octavius, Atalia vowed silently, teeth grinding. And I will kill you. And I will kill you, Emperor Marcus Octavius. Her tears burned. I will kill every last Aelarian who ever set foot in Zohar.

  "Commander," Daor said, voice softer now. "I'm sorry about what happened. To your father. I admired him greatly. He would often visit my family's pottery shop, break bread with us. He was a great lord, yet not too great to spend time with those who served him, who loved him. We'll always remember him, all those across Zohar, from sea to desert."