Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  “Your father is a smart man,” Quay said. “If Yenor’s Highest says the dragon isn’t real, then it’s not.”

  Colin was squinting at the spine of another book. Its title, inked in wide gold letters, read, A History of the Dragon Sherduan and the Fall of Mennennar.

  “Can you read that?” Quay asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  “When you can, I’ll lend it to you.”

  Colin nodded again, and Quay went back to the pack.

  “Quay?” Colin was looking at the swords again. “You didn’t tell me why you’re leaving yet.”

  With one hand on a scratchy set of trousers, the prince stopped and frowned.

  I cannot send you, his father had said.

  The walls in the palace had ears. It was all he could have said. But Quay had felt the brief goodbye in the touch on his shoulder, read the rest in his father’s eyes:

  I cannot send you, but you must go.

  “Grown-up things,” Quay said.

  Colin screwed his face up and stamped his feet. Quay shook his head and went back to packing, but when he looked back a moment later, the boy was still pouting.

  “Tell you what,” Quay said. He squatted so he was eye-to-eye with his cousin. “You tell Misha everything I said to you today, and don’t forget a thing, and maybe she’ll tell you why I have to go.”

  He wanted to take Misha Galeni with him. His wiry, sharp-eyed cousin was clever. She was loyal. She would understand what he was doing, and she could help him.

  But her father would never let her go, and if Quay took her without permission he would be followed. So he would have to rely upon others instead.

  Colin’s face lit up. “Really?”

  Quay nodded. His cousin bounced in place for a second, then frowned again.

  “How will she know?”

  “She’s your big sister. She knows a lot of things.”

  The prince looked out at the sun again. It was rising toward the clouds. His friend would already be on his way, or close to it. Quay carried the pack, the purse, and the swords into his bedroom and set them down behind the door, where no one would be able to see them from the solar.

  “Time to go,” he said to Colin when he returned. The boy kicked a chair by the stone table petulantly, and Quay dropped down to his level again. “You promised,” he reminded him. “What did you promise?”

  Colin looked at the floor. “That I would leave when you told me to.”

  “And?”

  “And not a word to anyone.”

  “Except for Misha,” Quay said. “Off you go then, and tell Thomas and Bors that they’re dismissed.”

  Colin nodded and walked to the door. When he reached it, he paused, fingering the handle and scuffing his feet on the floor.

  “Quay?” he asked again, and the prince raised an eyebrow in response. “Be careful.”

  The door opened and shut, and then little Colin Galeni was gone and Quay took a deep breath.

  Careful, he thought. As if it’s all that simple.

  His father was going off to the isle of the necromancers to die. The only reason for Aegelden Elpioni and the temple he controlled to lie about the history of the dragon was to provoke a confrontation with the necromancers and use it to make a play for the throne.

  Quay didn’t often feel afraid. Coolness was his birthright. The strength of the line of Eld for generations. It had led them through rebellion, infighting, war. When his enemies grew emotional and made mistakes, the blood turned to ice in an Eldani’s veins. It had to. There was no other way to rule.

  But Quay didn’t have a better word than fear to describe the uncertainty gnawing at his stomach.

  The solar door opened, and a white-mustached man wearing a plumed helmet stuck his veiny nose through it. “Beg your pardon, my prince, but Master Galeni said…”

  Thomas. Of course it was Thomas. Tall, wiry, ancient Thomas Palaceborn, who’d been sworn to Quay’s service on the day of his birth. Who’d held Quay’s hand while his mother had died and slipped him candies and pastries when his father had punished him unnecessarily. Who’d once struck an official of House Pendilon square in the face on his behalf and suffered twenty lashes and a night in the stocks as punishment. Thomas who was ever so much smarter than he was supposed to be. Thomas who wouldn’t want to leave him on a morning like this one.

  “I know,” said Quay. He crossed the solar and laid a hand on his guardian’s black-clad shoulder. “I asked him to. My father needs you more than I do.”

  Thomas’s mustache drooped into a frown. He reached up with one gloved hand and twirled an end of it, as though carefully considering what he ought to do next.

  Quay couldn’t take Thomas with him. The palace had rarely been more dangerous, and he would sleep better knowing his father had Thomas, at least, to confide in and trust. And Thomas was old, long overdue to put down his halberd and take up a steward’s platter and carafe.

  What Quay had in mind was a task for the young.

  Thomas released his mustache. His blue eyes narrowed. “My prince—”

  “I’ll be fine,” Quay said. He gave Thomas’s shoulder a shake. “Trust me.”

  Thomas stared at him for a moment longer. He closed his eyes. He sighed.

  And then he bowed.

  “Yes, my prince,” he said.

  Thomas withdrew, and Quay heard him talking to Bors as their footsteps moved down the hall.

  Yes, my prince, he’d said. He always did.

  Quay’s father had been caught in a trap ten years in the making. The alliances that kept him on the throne had been unraveling since the Eyeless Plague had taken Quay’s mother and brother and the riots that followed had taken most of the king’s friends amongst the Seven. White-haired Aegelden Elpioni and black-hearted Aesith Lord Pendilon had come to power during the blood of those riots, and they’d never forgiven Molte II Eldani for letting them happen. Quay couldn’t save his father, and he couldn’t save Quay.

  But Quay could save Eldan.

  The memory of his dream filled his mind. He’d seen Eldan City in flames, smelled soot and blood and fire, heard his people wailing in terror and pain. A ribbon of black shadow with a mane of fire had hung in clouds of smoke above the carnage, smiled a tiger’s grin, and whispered, I am coming.

  He had woken to the news of the heart dragons’ destruction.

  Quay stood with his hand on the door, breathing slowly. A ring of silver and white jade hung from a chain around his neck, cool and slick against the skin of his chest. It had been a gift from his mother in a time long past, when the world had been simple and bright, and the title of Prince of Eldan had sat on his brother’s broad shoulders. Quay had a portrait of the two of them on his wall. The artist had captured the atmosphere around their deaths as well as their likenesses; they sat on red velvet chairs, sad-eyed and wearing cloth of silver, strong and regal.

  Watch over me, he asked them.

  A semicircular balcony of gray stone hung from his rooms over the river valley that had nurtured his family for generations. For one last time, he strode through the airy curtains that covered it and gazed down Palace Hill. The wide, white-walled complexes of his cousins in the Seven Houses bustled in the predawn light. The homes and shops of well-to-do merchants and craftsmen packed between belched smoke from tall chimneys. The blue-gray streak of the Eldwater was hidden at the heart of a long snake of lingering fog beyond, and the crooked hang of Sentinel Hill fought the rising sun on the river’s far side with the slums stretched hopelessly below it.

  A curtain of rain swept toward him across the river. Fresh, clean rain. Not too heavy, not yet. He welcomed the first drops as they hit his skin, and then he retreated to the shelter of the balcony arch. He stood, and he watched, and he waited.

  What he was about to do would be difficult. The kindness in him, the warmth, would have to be kept under lock and key to serve a greater good. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but he would be strong. He would be cold. He would be h
ard.

  Yes, my prince, his people would say when he pushed them, even if not in as many words. It was what they’d been taught for their whole lives to do.

  It was the first day of Openmonth. Soon, his closest friend would be coming to see him. Then the journey would begin.

  He was Quay Eldani, and he would do what no one else could.

  SEVEN

  Cole woke to the hard leather poke of a boot in his rib cage and pulled his blankets above his head. He could hear the hiss of rain outside, but it was warm under the blankets, soft and warm and nice and comfortable…

  “Up, Cole. Now. I’ll be needing your help with the levy again.”

  The boot dug into his torso just below his bottom rib, where it hurt enough to make him lose his breath. He coughed, and it was removed.

  Grumbling and rubbing his side, Cole rolled out of bed and found himself staring at the stubble-covered, unshaven face of his father. His nose throbbed dully.

  One of these days, he thought. One of these days I’ll leave for good, and you’ll miss me when I do. I swear it.

  Cole’s father frowned and left the bedroom, and Cole lay back on his bed and let out a heavy sigh. The thatch above him was starting to break and hang down. It would need replacing soon, and the job would probably fall to him and his brother.

  On his way out of the room, he noticed that Litnig’s bed was empty.

  Strange, he thought. It was Eld’s Day, and that was Litnig’s day off.

  Cole stepped lightly down the creaking wooden stairs to the kitchen, grabbed a crust of day-old bread from the table, and shucked into his heaviest wool cloak. When he opened the door, he discovered that it was pouring outside. Deep puddles had formed in the muddy expanse of the yard. The world was wet, the sky was gray, and the city looked bloody miserable.

  His father was standing under the eaves smoking a pipe, and Cole passed by the fat man and into the cold, muddy world beyond without a word or a glance. The wagon was already harnessed and loaded in the middle of the yard.

  Cole rolled his eyes and scuttled under a blanket in the back of it. Every time his father lost his temper, he tried to make up for it by doing things like loading the wagon before waking Cole up the next day, or opening and closing the gate to the yard on his own. But he never apologized, and he never admitted he’d been wrong, and Cole never gave him the satisfaction of acknowledging the attempts to mollify him.

  The driver’s seat creaked as his father climbed into it, and then the mule snicked and snorted and the cart lurched into motion.

  The wagon groaned through a city muffled by more than just the weather. Usually, when it rained all talk was of the level of the Eldwater, of how bad flooding had gotten in the slums or how likely it was to spread. But the people Cole rolled past were speaking of other things. One man’s family had shared an unspeakable nightmare. Someone else’s dog had gone mad. A third man’s three-year-old son had been crying since the middle of the night.

  Cole sunk deeper into the cart and tried to forget the eyes of a dragon and the shearing feeling he’d woken up with in his chest. Tried to forget his brother’s pale and shaken face and the slaughter at the Old Temple.

  All those people dead, he thought, and they’re worried about nightmares. A box poked into his back, and he shoved it roughly aside. And where the hell is Litnig?

  Cole’s brother usually slept in on his days off, and it worried Cole more than he wanted to admit that Litnig was out of the house so early. The city was on edge, and his brother wasn’t always quick to pick up on that.

  Cole hoped he wasn’t getting into any trouble.

  The wagon headed south along a roaring Eldwater that was only a few feet below its embankments. The mule pulled. The wagon squeaked. Houses and shops passed by, blurry shadows in the rain.

  Up front, Cole’s father was a silent blob in the driver’s seat emitting occasional puffs of smoke. He clicked and whistled, and the wagon turned to face the Eldwater and joined a short line of others like it. Cole had a brief glimpse back into the nearly empty streets of the Merchants’ Crescent out of the back of the cart before it clattered onto a wide, low barge. Men shouted and whistled. Winches turned, and the ferry began its journey across the Eldwater’s swollen currents toward a cleft in the dark bluffs on the other shore.

  There were guards there, checking the wagons moving into Palace Hill, but Cole and his father were well known to them. Cole didn’t even have to get up, and they were waved onto a steep, winding road up the bluffs.

  A red-cloaked House guard squatting at the top of the bluffs scowled at them as they emerged onto the wide white stones of Palace Way. Red was the color of House Elpion. Cole had seen none of the silver of House Eldani all morning. Odd, he thought. He would’ve expected the king’s men to be handling security.

  Cole was familiar with the tall complexes that lined Palace Way and the view of the onion-turreted Palace of Eldan at its end. His father held one of only a few greengrocer contracts with the palace, and Cole had been helping with the business since he was five. On his first day, his father had dressed him up nicely, dragged him into the palace yard for reasons that had only become clear long after the fact, and told him to get lost and look cute.

  Getting lost had been easy. The palace’s maze of stone hallways and vaulted ceilings and plushly decorated rooms had dwarfed the warren of streets in which Cole had spent the first few years of his life. Looking cute had been harder. He’d panicked at the unfamiliar, fancily dressed women and the tall men wearing swords and rich clothes. He’d been on the verge of tears when a plump, kind-looking woman in white had swept him up into a big, sunlit room full of other children. She’d ooed and cooed and called him “Little Lord Graydawn,” and he’d been much too petrified to correct her.

  In that room of children and mothers, one tall, brown-haired boy had commanded all the attention. Unheeded in a corner had stood a darker, small-framed child staring out the window. Cole had crept quietly over, and by the time the mistake had been sorted, he and Quay Eldani had become fast friends.

  Water dripped on Cole’s nose, and he squirmed deeper into the spaces between containers of vegetables in the back of the cart. The wool over him was thick, tight-woven Northplain stuff, and under two layers of it he was warm even in the rain. The complexes passed to the right and left of him as the wagon traveled the long, straight road to the palace. He swayed from side to side with its motion, listened to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves clacking along the flagstones, the hush of rain on buildings. And as he dozed, he thought of Quay’s mother—a tall, smiling, violet-eyed woman with strawberry hair who’d let him into her son’s world, insisted upon grooming him for a life at Quay’s side, and then died before he’d had a chance to learn why.

  And he wondered, again, where his brother was.

  Some time later, Cole jerked awake and found his father’s fat face hissing at him. Torin had a massive barrel of pickled something between his burly arms, and his bald head was steaming in the rain. He did not look happy. Cole closed his eyes again and cursed a moment later as he was yanked forward by the collar and dropped on his feet at the wagon’s back.

  “Watch your tongue, boy,” said his father. They were in the palace’s northeast courtyard, near the stables and the kitchens. The six-storied stone building itself yawned above them. Torin pointed toward the kitchen door. “People are saying there’s war with the necromancers coming. They’ll be hiking the levy if that’s true. Go make sure I don’t have to pay it.”

  Torin shoved him forward, and Cole shot through the rain and a warm, open door into the kitchens, glad to be out of the weather and away from his father. He dropped his hood, shook some of the water from his hair and helped himself to a roll dipped in honey before being shooed out. The palace servants knew him well, especially the ones who worked the kitchen. He licked the honey from his fingers as he passed into the corridors of the palace itself.

  The big stoneheap was damp as a spring snowstorm, and Col
e’s shoulders twinged as he walked. He rolled them back and forth, trying to work out some tightness just above his collarbones, and he trailed his fingers along the smooth stone of the walls. He loved the palace. It had always been a heaven away from his home, a place where the problems belonged to other people and all he had to do was make them laugh.

  He wound up a few levels, heard angry murmurs coming from some rooms and quiet whispers from others, passed palace guards and house guards and temple soulweavers and legions of servants and courtiers. He caught snippets of conversation about ships and spears and armor and supply trains, and he fought a growing sense of dread. War. With the necromancers.

  “When the rich fight wars,” he thought, “they pay the poor to bleed.” It was something they said in Thieves’ Rise, well away from the ears of the rich they so loved to talk about, but that didn’t make it any less true.

  There were no guards on Quay’s door. The only person Cole saw while approaching it was a wide-eyed, frightened-looking kid in the colors of House Galeni. The kid froze when he spotted Cole and then ran off in the other direction.

  Odder and odder, Cole thought.

  He knocked lightly and entered the prince’s suite.

  Inside, all the doors were open. No fire had been laid, despite the rain. Quay himself was standing alone in the big stone archway that led to his private balcony. The prince was still as relatively small as he’d been in childhood, but he’d grown into his body. He looked comfortable in his skin, strong in a way that had nothing to do with muscles. A rich black doublet trimmed with silver rested over his shoulders and his thick gray trousers, and high boots and riding gloves covered his feet and hands. He faced the city with his fingers laced together tightly behind his back, motionless.

  Cole whistled—one low note, then a high one that slid back down. His friend didn’t move, so Cole took up position next to him in the archway, staring into the rain.

  “In the slums,” Cole said, “they say that it rains this hard because Yenor loves pissing all over them.”