“I am the king’s ward. I was promised to him at the time of my birth as a declaration of peace. I was daughter of King Aslom of the Evidanus Realm.”
The Evidanus Realm was gone, attacked by an unknown enemy and burned out of existence nearly ten years ago. No one knew what had happened. It was rumored that riders were sent from the realm in search of allies and reinforcements were never heard from. The kingdom perished alone. Mykal was speaking to the last of the Evidanus people. “Your highness,” he said, kneeling.
“Stand,” she said. “I am no longer royalty. There is no kingdom. No crown to inherit. I am heir to nothing.”
He stood, eyes closed in an attempt at warding off pain shooting up his side.
“You are injured. I can help you,” she said, reaching out a hand.
He stopped her, taking her hand in his.
“I’ll live,” he said. “What can you possibly want from me, princess? I still don’t understand.”
“You will call me Karyn. I am no longer a princess,” she said, the bite in her words evident. It contained flavors of both bitterness, and more strongly, sorrow. She barely suppressed her pain. Her lineage wiped out, her family and subjects slaughtered while she lived in the shadows of a foreign kingdom. “I don’t have an answer to your question. Not yet.”
Mykal wondered if she’d ever visited the ruins. “Won’t the king be looking for you?”
She nodded. “There is a feast this evening. There is always a feast after a hanging. I’ll be back long before he realizes my absence.”
Mykal didn’t know anything about feasts. His dinner had already been eaten by the Isthmian Serpent. “I need to be getting home. I have to check on my grandfather.”
“I just needed to meet you.” Her eyes said something different. They sparkled, even in the darkly greying skies. She could have waited, but for whatever unsaid reason, had felt compelled to do so on this day. Was that significant?
He had more questions, and felt he deserved answers. He also just wanted to keep her talking. He didn’t want her to leave. Not yet. It was getting late. A storm was coming. If it was like the night before and reached land this time, it could be brutal.
The road from his house to the kingdom was straightforward, but that didn’t mean it was always safe. He had no idea what the Cicade people were really doing inside Grey Ashland’s borders. More could be about. “Let me stop back to the house and drop off my fishing gear, then I will escort you home.”
“There is no need. Just beyond the dunes I have two armed knights on horseback. They are men I trust with my life, and with this secret.”
“What secret?”
“You.” She sighed. “We will meet again, Mykal. I felt it important for us to meet before then, so when I come to you, you will not be frightened.”
Frightened? The king’s ward knew who he was, and expected him to do ... something? Why would he be frightened? Surprised, certainly. Curious, absolutely.
Still wet from the sea, it masked the beads of sweat forming on his brow. How was he considered a secret? Who was the secret from? Who else knew the truth? “When will we meet again?”
The wind picked up loose sand and blew it around.
“I’m not exactly sure, but soon, I suspect.”
Soon, he hoped. “And when you find me the second time, I’m to help you?”
“No. You’ve got it backwards. I’m here to help you. You may be the only one who can save the old empire,” she said, as she turned and walked up the dune, and beyond. Though Mykal could not take his eyes off of her, she had continued on without looking back once.
Wait. Save the old empire?
***
Mykal rushed home, his gear banging against his leg, his wounds throbbing. The loose items inside the tackle box rattled and bounced. He wore his bow on his back, the string across his shoulder. The bleeding on his legs and chest had slowed. The bleeding wouldn’t stop until the wounds had a chance to close. Moving around prevented that. The areas were sore, and gross to see. He wanted to get home fast and fetch fresh water from the well. He worried even a thorough cleaning of his wounds wouldn’t stop an infection.
It appeared his grandfather still sat in his chair on the front porch. As Mykal got closer he realized that it wasn’t his grandfather. He quickened his pace, excited. The man on the front porch wore a tan tunic under a dark green cloak, the hood down. Long, thin black hair hung to just above the center of his chest. His matching facial hair consisted of bushy, overgrown eyebrows, the arms of a mustache that fell past the corners of his chin, and were tied at the ends with little bits of string; the chin hair was also long and thick, and braided.
Blodwyn’s cedar staff shod with iron was six feet long, and leaning against the porch railing. He grabbed it as he got to his feet. “Mykal? You’ve been hurt,” he said.
“It’s nothing. We need to talk,” Mykal said.
Blodwyn furrowed his brow. “Have you been fishing?”
Mykal set down his tackle box, and removed the bow from his back. “If you want to call it that. Listen—”
“We need to clean those wounds. Right away,” Blodwyn said. He spent a moment eyeing every inch of Mykal, searching for additional cuts not clearly visible. He spun Mykal around and lifted the back of his tunic.
“Stop that. I’m okay, I tell you.” Mykal set down his bow by the box. He knew the cuts were bad. It was perfect timing Blodwyn was here. He’d planned to call on him after dinner. Now he didn’t have to track the man down.
“These look quite serious,” he said.
“Can it wait? Just a few moments? I really need to talk to you. There was this young woman I met today. I am not sure I know exactly who she is, or what she wants. Or why she followed me, but she told me—”
“Fetch water from the well,” he said. “We’ll talk about this mysterious woman after. Right now, you grab the water and I’ll get prepared inside.”
“Prepared? What are we preparing for?”
“I’ve seen those type of cuts before. You were in the Isthmian, weren’t you? How many times have I told you not to swim that water?”
No one swam in the sea. “I was. But not by choice… this time.”
“There are copious amounts of poison inside your body, Mykal.”
“Copious? Big word.”
Not at all amused, Blodwyn said, “I hope for your sake this just happened. If too much time has lapsed, the consequences could be irreversible.”
Blodwyn always made everything sound desperate and dire. Fire and brimstone. The man thrived on imaginary danger. A good man, perhaps even a great man, but he’s always been a little over dramatic.
“I don’t know how much time has passed, Blodwyn, but it couldn’t have happened too long ago,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment. It felt like his brain had become dislodged inside his skull. Despite the ever-increasing clouds, what little natural light remained hurt his eyes.
“Go and lie down. I’ll fetch the well water.” He held out a hand.
There was a sudden sharp pain behind his eyes. Rubbing his temples didn’t help. His clothing reeked of the sea. All he smelled was salt and fish. He wanted out of his clothing. He didn’t think he could remove them without tipping over. He moved his hands away from his head and held them out to keep from falling. “I’m okay, Wyn, I—”
“Really? Because you don’t look okay,” he said. His hand grabbed Mykal’s forearm, catching him before he toppled forward.
The door opened. Grandfather was at the threshold. “What’s going on? Mykal, what’s wrong?”
“He’s been cut, multiple times. The dorsal fins of an Isthmian Serpent are deadly. It is meant to incapacitate prey much larger than the beats so they can devour it without wasting energy fighting. How he’s still alive right now is beyond me. It isn’t like a serpent to carve up its meal and then allow it to escape. Let me get him to his bed. We have to act quickly. Isolating the poison is all but impossible now. The best we can hope to do i
s counter the negative effects and neutralize it from doing damage.”
“I’m okay, Grandfather. I’m just numb,” Mykal mumbled. He touched his hand to his face. “But, I can’t feel my tongue. Or my lips.”
Grandfather looked at Blodwyn and cocked his head to the side. “What did he say?”
“I’m not positive. We need to get him inside,” Blodwyn said.
“It’s going to be okay, Mykal,” Grandfather said.
I can’t feel my arms, Mykal thought he said, yet hadn’t heard his voice. I can’t feel my arms. He realized he wasn’t actually talking. The words formed inside his mind. He couldn’t get his tongue to move, or his mouth to open.
Chapter 6
The Mountain King sat at the end of a twenty-foot-long table; clawed feet at the end of thick legs gripped the floor; pointed arches along the undersides ran its length. His high-backed chair was solid mahogany, kiln-dried, and finished with a dull brown polish. The king’s sigil was carved into the back frame above the burgundy leather cushion, and spires rose like castle towers to either side. Queen Chorazin sat across from him, a matching chair for comfort and prestige, and his princesses at their mother’s sides.
He felt an outsider in his own castle. He watched them eat and whisper. Unable to hear a single word of their hushed conversation. They weren’t whispering to exclude him. They whispered because they all sat close together and there was little reason to talk above a whisper. Long ago he’d thought of ordering all three to sit closer to him. Then he considered having just his daughters near him. Instead, he did nothing. He was not going to force his family to be next to him. If they wanted to sit at the opposite end of the table and ignore him, so be it.
His irritated feelings did nothing more than ripen, fester, and spoil, becoming a diverticulitis of the mind and soul. The temptation to throw grapes and pieces of sliced turkey at them grew as they giggled, especially when they didn’t show the common courtesy of including him. He refrained if only because he was hungry and the cook’s gravy coated the meat so evenly. Throwing food across the room would be a waste; the meal was so good he didn’t even want leftovers scraped into bowls for the royal hounds.
Tall stained-glass windows graced the western wall of his dining hall. Sunlight filtered in through the array of sectioned colors, playing across the room and giving everything a patchwork reddish-orange and greenish-blue glow, except during storms. When the sky was black, the palace was so dark that often torches seemed useless against the shadows. King Hermon Cordillera preferred the grey. The drab blocks of the stone walls, and slabs on the floor, were color enough. The outside of the castle was lighter grey than the charcoal rock of the mountain. Even the banners hanging everywhere inside the castle—the Cordillera sigil displayed on tightly woven silk cloth—detracted from the peace he found in the solidarity of grey surrounding him.
The king held up his chalice. The cup-bearer stepped forward, poured more wine. “Sire,” he said, and stepped back, away from the table.
King Cordillera drank the vintage in gulps, leaned back in his chair, and never looked away from his family. Was there a time he cared for his wife? In her youth she was pretty, he supposed, with long auburn hair, and small waist. Her breasts had been full, and her legs shapely and long. She had never lost the weight gained during each pregnancy, however, and there had been more than the two. There had been a miscarriage after the birth of Raaheel, and a stillborn after Sarah. That had been his boy and heir to the throne.
The weight gain wouldn’t matter so much if he didn’t also loathe her as a person. Not a single redeeming quality remained once the lusciousness of her form had passed. He wasn’t sure why she was such a bitter woman. She came from a kingdom of nothingness. In his Osiris Realm, he’d showered her in wealth. Her largest complaint was isolation. It didn’t matter to her that the Rames Mountains were a natural and nigh impenetrable barrier. An enemy could attempt to scale the jagged cliffs, but his guards would spot them long before any damage could be inflicted, before any breach assayed, and they’d be knocked from the face as easily as a stone could be nudged from the ramparts. The Rames were perhaps the sole reason the kingdom had never been under siege, never mind the strength of the fortress itself. Other nations easily understood the folly of any attack, just not his wife.
The chamberlain entered the hall. “Sire, forgive me for disrupting your meal.”
Cordillera set his cup down, snapped his fingers at the cup-bearer. He wanted more wine. “The disruption is most welcome.”
The chamberlain stood aside and waited while the cup-bearer refilled the chalice. He cleared his throat. “The knight guarding Ida’s tower. He indicates that she has summoned you.”
“She summoned me?” Hermon Cordillera poked a finger at his chest, ready to yell, and knock things off the table, but stopped himself. In all the years Ida’s been in the tower, she had never once sent for him.
She had found something.
He had been patient. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. The wizard must have used magic. “Did she give an indication what this was in relation to?”
The chamberlain shook his head. He held a red velvet hat in his hands, and turned it over. “Just that you were the only one she would talk to, sire. She refused to answer a single question. I came for you immediately. I did not want to disturb your dinner, but neither did I want to wait. I knew this must be important, sire.”
Cordillera drank the wine. He held the cup in one hand, and picked at food in his teeth with the pinkie on his other. Pushing away from the table, he slapped a hand on the wood. The queen and his two princesses looked up. It was as if they had forgotten anyone else was in the hall. Their meals, and whispering, were momentarily halted.
“I regret to inform you that I must attend to urgent matters and that you will be forced to enjoy the rest of your meal without me.” Sarcasm was wasted on the queen. The children were ten and eight. Unfortunately, they were spitting images of their mother after the weight gain. Like her they spent the days grazing. Food was her priority, and now it was theirs as well. If they understood the wit thrown at them, they gave no sign. It seemed his vitriol was also wasted on his offspring.
He wanted a son desperately, but was torn. Coupling with the fat queen repulsed him. He felt no guilt in wishing that she suffer some dangerously unavoidable fate. Accidentally, of course. The only thing that prevented him from ensuring such was the princesses. They did seem to love their mother, though he couldn’t imagine why.
He snatched a large hunk of white meat from his plate, and stormed out of the dining hall, chamberlain in tow. He walked proudly, chest puffed, head held high. He cherished the halls, and loved the echo his footfalls produced as he strode across the stone floors.
With his palace having been built on the side of a mountain, he didn’t have the luxury of spreading out over acres of land. His castle went into the sky, and was often in with low hanging clouds. It also went down into the belly of the mountain. Many of the halls were actually caves covered over with cinder walls. Import and export of supplies and goods was straight forward. The shipments were received and sent out of the Fjord Range, where the king kept a fleet of vessels, despite the Voyagers claim on the sea. However, he rarely sailed his ships. There hadn’t been a need in the past.
There may be a need in the near future, though.
The foundation was constructed on the plateau of one mountain top, and backed up directly into the rise of another peak. From a distance the castle blended with the rocky terrain. If you didn’t know the castle was there, you might never spot it amidst the rocks. Once you recognized it, you couldn’t look away. It was magnificent.
The castle was sleek, narrow and tall with six towers, each fit with its own bartizan that contained machicolated floors, designed to allow rocks or boiling oil to be cast upon enemies foolish enough to climb the mountain with malicious intent. There were additional such defenses along the parapets that led from tower, to tower, to tower.
There had been books in his library penned by fools who claimed to know where wizards hid, and the number that still walked the lands. Cordillera had sent knights not to the locations outlined, but to track down the authors of these works. Under questioning, with very little . . . persuasion, the writers admitted to crafting fiction published as fact. Disgusted by their ruse, he had each individual summarily executed. Who had time for made up stories? They did not educate, or entertain. The volumes were removed and burned along with the bodies of their authors.
There were no windows inside the towers, only slits from which archers could fire if needed. An Iron bowl with burning coals sat on every third step of the spiraling staircase. The flames within these braziers created flickering shadows that grew, shrank, and multiplied like childhood nightmares dancing along the walls.
Severed Empire: Wizard's Rise Page 4