by E. J. Beaton
She was pushed forward before she could ask him more. The Valderrans and Lyrians were leading a surge, driving the Pericleans back toward the chimera, and her elite guards were following Raden after them. Now, surely, it was logical to charge.
Shouting over the clash of steel, she led the rest of the Axiumites forward, bringing them up behind the first wave of soldiers and raising her dagger as she commanded them. The White Queen’s people were hemmed in now, but they were giving as good as they got. Close by her, Jale’s sister Élérie thrust a smallsword into a mercenary’s face before another soldier ran her through from behind; she fell forward slowly, her eyes wide. Lysande heard screams and saw Chidney racing toward the killer. She knew, even as she shouted a warning, that Chidney had not seen the mercenary coming up on her left.
She had a glimpse of Litany tackling Chidney; of the two of them ducking beneath a longsword, scrambling and sprinting, while Raden ran in to cut off the mercenary’s blow.
It could not have taken five seconds in total. A swing. A clash of swords. Over the sound of steel, Raden gave a blood-choked cry. Lysande felt that cry echo inside her. The fighters near him moved aside, and she saw the blade that pierced his chest like a jousting lance cutting through wood.
Not Raden, she thought. He could not have fallen: just minutes ago, he had led a charge through a throng of bronze-clad bodies. Before that, her fingers had gripped his shield.
But more to the point, there were all those years between them, all those quieter moments riding after Sarelin, drinking together at night, playing at tactos, throwing darts together with a wobbling aim; and she had not forgotten the small acts of kindness he had shown her, in sharing her company, year after year. She drew a shuddering breath before bracing herself, driving her dagger into the next attacker.
She fought twice as fast, then, raining blows on the woman. By the time she got clear of the next group, Raden lay still on the ground. She found him with eyes open, staring up at the darkening sky.
His eyelids felt soft against her fingers, unexpectedly soft, as she closed them. She pressed her forefinger to each one.
If this was a tragedy, there was no time to mourn. More soldiers were approaching, and she focused on the scene ahead, holding back her emotions about Raden until she could taste them. The Pyrrhans had closed ranks into a knot, Cassia at the front, her left eye a bloody mess and her left cheek streaked with red. The wound transfigured her face into a battle-mask. As she raised a serrated sword, several mercenaries scattered.
“Jale!” Luca shouted.
Lysande rose. She saw a group of Pericleans closing on the Lyrians, some of them splitting off to target a single fighter. She drew another shuddering breath.
There was no way Jale could win against so many opponents. He had nowhere to run to, with the table cutting him off and a fire blazing behind him. She tried to push toward him. With all the power in her lungs, she took up Luca’s cry.
Jale did not shrink back: he stabbed one mercenary between his arm-guard and shoulder-guard. The shadow of a big soldier fell across him. Ducking, Jale sliced the woman in the leg and leaped onto her back to slash her throat. Lysande watched him weave around the others like a dancer. The soldiers moved in on him as he vaulted down, and while he evaded two and killed another with a single blow, he did not stop the woman who had crept around beside him. Her sword-point found his shoulder.
Blood painted Jale’s arm. Two mercenaries closed in. Another came around on his left in a pincer movement—Lysande screamed a warning—and a brown cape whirled through their midst.
Lysande heard Dante’s roar even before seeing him. His axe cracked the helmet of the woman like a knife splitting a walnut. Brains spilled out, and nearby, somebody retched. Dante let the mercenary fall and wheeled around, turning on the others. Hacking, he took an arm clean off one soldier, gouged another in the chest, struck a third below the abdomen, the skill of a butcher and the aim of a swordsman in his strokes. Lysande could not bring herself to look away. Bile was rising in her throat again. A man ran behind Jale and locked his arms around the young prince’s neck, nearly choking him.
Dante smiled grimly as he walked toward the mercenary. “There’s a punishment for thieves, in Valderos,” he said.
“I am no thief.” The man’s Eliran was perfect, a little too cleanly adapted, but the fear in his voice did not need translation.
“You’re holding my jewel.” Dante raised his axe. “That makes you a thief.”
The soldier let go of Jale, leaping backward, landing against a fallen Lyrian guard and stumbling, and Dante did not pause for even a second; he hacked the mercenary’s neck over and over, until Jale placed a hand on his arm, and at last, Dante lowered his weapon. Jale stroked the First Sword’s blood-spattered jaw, and Dante leaned down, bringing their lips together as easily as a wave meeting sand.
“Vindictus’ gory sword!” Cassia shouted, next to them. “Get it over with!”
Dante did not appear to be interested in following her advice. The northern and southern guards who surrounded the princes were frowning deeply. Lysande barely had time to take that in and to navigate the shoals of her emotions: satisfaction at guessing the truth, relief for Dante and Jale, and her stubborn, accompanying fear for both princes.
She turned, feeling a tug at her arm. Derset had come around on her left and was shielding her. He had found a sword, and his hair was askew.
“Captain Chidney sent me with a message for you, my lady,” he said. In the middle of the throng, Lysande saw Chidney fighting an enormous soldier in a spiked helmet, Litany wielding a dagger by her side. “She says we’re winning the battle, but she needs you to bring the last group of troops in from the palace.”
“We have no more troops!”
“She and Captain Hartleigh stationed fifty guards in the third-floor dining room.” Derset pointed toward the palace. Lysande felt a knife-point twist between her ribs at the mention of Raden’s name. “They were to be a final weapon. Captain Hartleigh asked to be excused for his temerity, my lady, with his final breath; he thought it was necessary to conceal them.”
Lysande just managed to suppress an exasperated retort, though she felt the prick of grief again between her ribs. “I mean to stay and fight,” she said. “Send our guards.”
“My lady, it seems Captain Hartleigh told the guards to only take orders from you.” Derset looked pained. “He felt that if he was busy trying to hold back the White Queen’s people here, you should be the one to take command. Please, my lady.”
Damn Raden’s Axiumite blood. Everything in its place, now, of all times?
None of the Pericleans were paying her or Derset any attention. Bronze armor flashed against silver and gold across the enclosure; mercenaries locked in combat with Elirans, cries and screams rising and falling with their blows; the chimera hovered, withholding its flames. Through the crowd she spotted a ring of Axiumites defending a body, and she knew whose it must be. For Raden, she thought: the kind of friend who handed you his shield in the middle of a battle.
“Can you shield me all the way across the platform and up the steps?” she said.
Derset moved beside her and, taking her by the hand, guided her up to the platform—past Six throwing fire, through the remains of the palms and over to the stairs, without looking back. They sprinted side by side. She could hear her breath in her ears as something sailed past her neck—a coin-knife, she realized, as it rolled across a step ahead, and Derset moved behind her, blocking another one with his shield. The third time, she did not flinch. In an hour’s length, while women and men were falling without prayer, you became used to death, its formless presence swirling around, waiting for your misstep, your false shot.
They burst through the doors of Rayonnant Palace and into the corridor, now empty. “Why on earth did Raden put them on the third floor?”
“I don’t know, my lady. I suppose that dining
room must have been the only place the Lyrians weren’t checking.”
“I hope they can fight well.” They were nearly at the top of the staircase. “The battle’s turning ugly.”
The second floor was just as desolate. She caught her breath, then ran with Derset up the next flight. There was not far to go once they emerged. The third-floor dining room had the advantage of being not far from the stairs, but it also had a blind corner before it. No sooner had they rounded the elaborately furnished bend than they came face to face with soldiers in armor and spiked helmets.
Lysande skidded to a halt, grabbing hold of a statue. The Pericleans rushed forward.
A woman with a chimera on her breastplate grabbed her by the shoulders; another pinned her hands behind her back. She struggled, kicking with all the energy left in her, but the mercenaries forced her arms into place. Another soldier with a star on his armor stepped forward and ran a finger down her cheek. She impelled herself to hold back a wave of fear.
The man’s breath gusted against her skin. A grin spread across his face, which was entirely unremarkable: no misshapen ears, no pockmarked cheeks, no extrusive scar; nothing that would have distinguished him from another citizen in a marketplace or city square; and that, in itself, made her heart flip over. It would have been almost comforting to see cruelty written on his skin; something, at least, for her to read. His smile, too, gave nothing away. There was a pause, in which all of the mercenaries looked at someone behind Lysande, and as she struggled, something that Derset had said popped into her mind: Captain Hartleigh asks to be excused for his temerity, my lady.
It had never been like Raden to apologize for battle tactics, nor to use a word like temerity.
“What should we do with this one?” the man touching Lysande’s cheek said, still grinning. “Kill her, or spend a little time with her?”
“We’ll take her up to the roof,” a voice answered. “Her Majesty wants her alive.”
It was a voice she knew all too well. Yet it was not the same voice. The earnest tone, the gentle turn of phrase, the hesitation that guided every suggestion—they were all gone, as if someone had pulled off a silk cover. Lysande twisted her neck as much as she was able.
Lord Derset met her look without a flicker of a reaction. He stood only a foot from her. With a casual movement he unbuttoned the back of his collar and shrugged off his robe, exposing a low-collared doublet. The cloth of the skinbrace was gone. A mark stood out on his bare neck; it was an image she had seen twice since Sarelin’s death, yet this third time was worst of all. The imprint of the chimera had blackened the skin.
Lysande could not repress a sharp exhalation.
How useful a high collar must have been.
Derset raised a hand and stilled her captor, who had begun to push her forward. “One moment.”
He held an arm out and, with a twist of his hand, sent a jet of flame onto his robe.
The green velvet caught fire and burned on the floor for a minute or so. Derset stood, watching it. The expression on his face was like that of a man who had unshouldered a boulder that he had been carrying for a very long time and was watching it roll away.
When the garment began to smoke, he nodded to the soldiers and walked on.
The group followed him as one. Lysande’s captor pushed her down the corridor, toward the stairs, and with a lurch of her stomach she realized that they were going away from the enclosure—past the fourth floor, the fifth, and the sixth, to somewhere higher still. Luca Fontaine’s entreaty not to leave the ball alone rang in her head.
It was never Fontaine, she thought. And it was never one of the city-rulers.
A door slammed below her. She felt the end of a sword-hilt in her back, and picked up her pace.
Fourteen
It was not easy to climb seven flights of stairs with her hands behind her back, least of all when she was being bumped over each step, her shins striking the stone. She winced a few times as she struggled up, laboring for breath, but her eyes remained on Derset, his silver-streaked hair glimmering in the torchlight, guiding them to the top.
Had he grown taller after casting off his robe? No—it was just that he was no longer stooping to whisper in her ear or tucking his hands behind his back. He waved the guards forward. Lysande swallowed something that she felt would be best unvoiced.
They stopped at the entrance to the tenth floor. The woman outside the door grasped the hilt of her sword. When she saw Derset, she raised her free hand to her chest.
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Hapsley?” Derset said.
The guard looked Lysande over, but could not produce an answer. Derset’s gaze did not soften.
“All weapons are to be confiscated and presented to Her Majesty. They’re property of the regime now. I thought your captain would’ve drummed it into that thick skull of yours. Take the blades, and be quick, or I’ll take an eye.”
Only a few daggers remained in Lysande’s sheaths after the battle, and these Hapsley procured, clutching them to her chest. For one protracted moment, Lysande feared that her doublet would be ripped open, the last few weapons exposed, yet the moment passed, and of course, fear was a strange beast: you always imagined that your enemies possessed the insights of your own mind. When Hapsley made to grasp the gold dagger, Derset stepped forward and stretched out his hand.
“I’ll take that one. You know she doesn’t like to see anything that reminds her of that woman.”
He slipped the dagger into the pocket of his trousers, and Lysande bit her lip as she watched it disappear. She reached up, almost unconsciously, to finger the chain around her neck. The texture, the sheen, even the temperature of that fluid silver: she knew them as intimately as a queen knows a crown. Ever since Derset had given the chain to her, she had only taken it off to bathe, and even then, it had remained within her view. Her fingers closed on a few links.
Derset smiled. “Oh, you can keep that,” he said. “It was never Sarelin Brey’s.”
She felt a wave of something molten rise in her throat, and fought it down.
A click of Derset’s fingers brought the soldiers through the door and into the corridor, and Lysande’s ribs knocked against the doorframe as they pushed her through.
The tenth floor served as a collection of rooms in which Lyrian royalty could venerate the sun—several prayer-rooms, a dining hall with glass walls, and then, largest of all, the observatory, Princess Ariane’s chandeliered creation, a tribute to nature at an unnaturally high cost. Derset led them down the corridor to where three people bent over a body. The corpse had been burned so thoroughly that only its head was untouched, and the arms, legs, and torso had turned the color of freshly cut meat; Lysande’s stomach heaved, yet she forced her eyes to witness. The molten tide inside her swirled again, mixed with something more violent.
The nearest elemental opened her palm, casting fire onto the corpse’s neck. Scowling, the woman looked up as they entered, greasy curtains of auburn hair framing her face. Lysande discerned that her belt was of Axiumite make; the buckle curved, emblazoned with a crown in the style of one of the capital merchants. The woman beside her sported a sapphire-studded sword-belt that could only be Lyrian, gilded and finely wrought. A slender man knelt farthest from Lysande, a bow slung on his back, the Rhimese design giving its wood the appearance of two snakes meeting fang to fang. Such a bow bore the mark of hours of craftwork, its form carved not only for strength but for beauty. The look on its owner’s face was anything but beautiful.
If only she had the glow of scale to wash the sight away. Nothing but a tide of gold could have eased this feeling. She forced herself to look again at the corpse’s seared flesh.
“Get up,” Derset said, as he entered. “All of you. Torturing a dead woman, are we, Raquefort?”
Derset walked over to the Lyrian. He poked the corpse on the floor with his foot. Lysande recognized
Jale’s sister Élérie’s face, now slashed with many cuts, a wet choker of blood around her throat. Her stomach roiled.
“We were interrogating her,” Raquefort said, sullenly.
“Do you think she’ll yield some useful information? Perhaps another half-hour and she might give us the details of the Lyrian defenses.” Derset turned to the woman with the Axiumite belt buckle. “You should be begging me for mercy, Crake. You too, Rimini.”
Lysande’s insides were still seething over Derset’s betrayal. She forced herself to examine the elementals before her. Raquefort, Crake and Rimini . . . she recognized those names, along with Hapsley’s. She had read them in the captains’ letters when she was compiling information for An Ideal Queen—had she not? “Crake’s legion takes Pelouse in northwest Lyria.” Yes. She had definitely copied that down. And she had noted the three names in the accounts of the White War she had borrowed from the Academy, among the handful of loyal Eliran elementals the White Queen had managed to recruit. Yet if twenty-two years had passed since the war, only Raquefort, the Lyrian woman, looked old enough . . . the other two, surely, must be the descendants of the captains. Did the White Army have its own family lineages? The idea seemed a mockery of the Axium motto, yet in her own way, the White Queen had applied the central idea. Everything in its place.
“In a short while, I will be speaking to Her Majesty,” Derset said. “And if you think she’ll be pleased when she hears how you’ve spent your time, then you have failed to grasp her character.”
“My lord—”
“Go down and kill any of the Councillors left.” He stepped toward Crake and the woman flinched. “Bring me their bodies when you’re done, and I might just forget to mention your negligence to Her Majesty.”
The trio gathered up their weapons, and Lysande wondered at the spectacle of powerful elementals fleeing from the man who had bowed and taken orders from her. Derset grabbed Crake by the arm and handed her his shield. “Give this to some idiot who needs it.”