Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Felix clenched his jaw and glared at him. “No.”

  “And if you had to guess?”

  “Then I’d say ask bloody N’abranaacht.”

  “If only we—” Giancarlo began, but Vincenzé’s pointed stare effectively silenced him.

  When the wielder turned back to Felix, his gaze betrayed not a hint of amity—not that there’d been much to begin with. “If something happens to the Princess Nadia because you were too scared for your own skin, Sarcova, I will personally flay you from forehead to heels and take my bloody slow time about it—the Lady as my witness.”

  Felix scrubbed at his nose with his forearm and looked sullenly up at him. “Are we done?”

  Vincenzé eyed him for a moment longer. Then he dug that silver coin from his pocket and tossed it at Felix. The lad caught the coin just before it struck his nose.

  “Give that as an offering when you make your next prayer.” Vincenzé ran a hard gaze across him. “Maybe the gods will listen if you bribe them, eh? Raine’s truth, you’re going to need their blessing to make it out of this alive.” He spun in a swirl of rebuke and stalked out with his cousin in tow. The stone door growled shut behind them with disturbing finality.

  Felix stared after them, feeling drained.

  The High Lord’s men had no idea how deep they’d all sunk into the stinking bog of N’abranaacht’s sedition—by the blessed Sanctos, Felix barely comprehended it himself! And if what Tanis had explained to him was true—which it mostly so far seemed to be—then they all had an Adept’s chance in Shadow of doing anything about it.

  Felix let out an explosive exhale and reconsidered his reticence to confess. But the truth was, he might’ve told the High Lord’s men everything he knew—anything that could have conceivably helped them—and still wind up on the far side of nowhere and only in deeper trouble himself.

  Bloody Sanctos on a stake!

  He was really going to have words with Tanis when he saw him again.

  ***

  Vincenzé pulled the door closed and exhaled a forceful breath. The ache behind his eyes was pushing heavily against his lids so that it was a grave effort to keep alert. He’d lost count of the sunsets and sunrises since he’d seen his bed.

  The Princess Heir was missing. If anyone dared spare a moment for sleep, the High Lord would ensure their eyes never opened again.

  Vincenzé looked to his cousin. “Did you get anything this time?”

  Giancarlo mashed his palms against his eyes and then shoved both hands back through his longish hair. “Gah…” he leaned his head back in the cup of his hands. “My brain feels as wooden as my limbs.”

  Vincenzé clapped a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “Nothing then?”

  “The boy has a natural ability to shield his mind.” Giancarlo dropped his arms to his sides. “I probed as far as I dared, but he’s as adept at avoiding my talent as he is at skirting the truth. The House of Lords would love him.”

  Vincenzé grunted. “A boy like Sarcova is far more likely to wind up on the other side of justice.” He started off down the passage.

  Giancarlo eyed him sidelong. “Do you really think Sarcova is using an unregistered variant trait? I couldn’t pry even a hint of that truth from his thoughts.”

  “All the pieces fit.”

  “But Davros di Sarcova wouldn’t have dared to keep such a secret from the Sormitáge. He would’ve reported his son’s variant trait to the Office of Recondite Scholars at the time of his enrollment.”

  “Maybe Davros doesn’t know.” Vincenzé exhaled a frustrated breath. “Dios mio, but Tanis put his finger on the truth from the outset. Do you remember when the lad said that someone with a variant trait could’ve taken Malin van Drexel from the Sormitáge and no one be the wiser?”

  “Sì, but Felix can’t be behind Malin’s disappearance. He spoke a truth when he said he and the princess were looking for the boy. There must be more to it.”

  “I think there’s a lot more to it than what few truths Felix di Sarcova lets slip across his tongue.” Vincenzé looked his cousin over. “But whatever is really going on, be assured, the princess and her two young knights are deep in the thick of it.”

  They descended a long flight of stairs and passed a row of armored soldiers, pushed through a pair of double doors, and headed down another set of wide steps into the open air. With the fall of twilight, the drizzle had intensified into a begrudging rain.

  Vincenzé pulled up the collar of his coat and upped his speed across the deserted square. The piazza was especially empty due to the High Lord having placed the city under curfew and the Red Guard on high alert. The only people out and about were those working beneath the High Lord’s own insignia.

  Investigators were still scouring the Quai field like ants, but they’d discovered little more than what everyone already knew—that the Danes had made off with nearly two hundred Adepts during the chaos, including the young truthreader Tanis di Adonnai—who’d been in the High Lord’s charge, and which fact His Grace was mightily disturbed over—and the Princess Heir, which very few people knew about, and which made Vincenzé dread the Empress’s imminent return from Köhentaal as if the forces of darkness were closing in upon him from all sides.

  Giancarlo frowned disagreeably up at the clouds. “His Grace suspects that the Princess Nadia and Tanis bonded with each other.”

  “Clearly they’re all three bonded into something together,” Vincenzé muttered by way of agreement.

  “Felix seemed convinced the Literato N’abranaacht was behind the invasion at the Quai game.” Giancarlo turned his cousin a curious look. “Why didn’t you want him to know that N’abranaacht is dead?”

  “The more Sarcova knows, the better he becomes at skirting the truth.”

  Giancarlo muttered an oath by way of agreement to this. “What else do you think Sarcova is keeping from us? Clearly he doesn’t know what happened to the princess.”

  Vincenzé narrowed his gaze. All the pieces of this puzzle were laid out before his vision, but he couldn’t yet put them into their proper order. He glanced to this cousin. “Walk this path with me: first the van Drexel boy steals one of the Qhorith’quitara books from the Archives and goes missing. Soon following this, Sarcova comes under suspicion for mysteriously appearing in places he shouldn’t have been able to access. Then, capita a fagiolo, Björn van Gelderan’s zanthyr shows up in the company of a lad with prodigious talent.”

  Giancarlo made a loop in the air with his hand, a gesture of disbelief. “Certo, the only dormitory room Tanis can be placed in is Felix’s.”

  “Naturalamente.” Vincenzé opened both palms in acknowledgment of this irony. “For a time, all goes quiet.”

  “The calm before the storm.”

  Vincenzé angled him a look of agreement. “Then, alla stoccata, the next thing we know, Varangians are terrorizing a Quai game across a twisted node; two demon creatures out of legend are exploding the stadium; a Literato who isn’t supposed to be able to work elae makes a dramatic show of wielding the fifth in front of half of Faroqhar while attempting to kill one of the demons; and the most important heir in the Empire goes missing—along with two hundred other Adepts.” Vincenzé turned his cousin a pointed look. “You think all of this isn’t somehow connected?”

  Giancarlo shrugged. “I just don’t see how.”

  Vincenzé blew out his breath. “Neither do I. But the Empress will return soon. No doubt she’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “And good night to the bucket,” Giancarlo grumbled, a phrase which implied, and that’s the end of us.

  This almost went without saying. And if they didn’t find the Princess Heir before Valentina’s ship reached Faroqhar, it wouldn’t be just their heads on the executioner’s block. The furthest reaches of the Empire would reverberate from the Empress’s fury.

  Four

  "Dare not trust Love to lead you. Love will stay the course, even to the edge of doom."

  –Valentina van Gelde
ran, Empress of Agasan

  Tanis lay on a blanket on a grassy hillside beneath Pelas’s Hallovian manor, gazing up into a very blue sky. The breeze bouncing off the sea cliffs stirred his hair, while the sun warmed his face and Nadia’s laughter warmed his heart. The spot they’d chosen for their picnic offered a commanding view of the charcoal cliffs and beyond these, the depthless blue sea.

  It might’ve been the wine that was making it difficult for Tanis to concentrate on the conversation Nadia was having with Pelas that afternoon, though he suspected it was more likely the heady sensation of his newly fashioned binding with the Malorin’athgul, which had wakened him to the essence of the cosmos in marvelous, yet unsettling, ways.

  ‘…Through me, you’re bound to the heavens, and through you, I’m bound to the earth…’

  They’d been just a few days bound now, and with each turning of the hourglass, Tanis gained some new perception. When he chose to sense the world through Pelas’s side of the binding, he could discern the density of the air, feel the obdurate pull of the moon—even conceive the far-flying motion of the planets in their propulsion around the sun; celestial bodies caught in a powerful equilibrium of forces.

  But Tanis didn’t often seek these perceptions, for they held an inherent largeness that disoriented him.

  The lad had expected his and Pelas’s binding to settle—perhaps into a passive state, like Phaedor’s binding of protection, or at least to a quiet awareness, as with the lighter, impermanent bond he shared with Nadia—but as Pelas glowed on the currents, so also did he glow in Tanis’s mind, even as Tanis seemed a sun in Pelas’s…or so the Malorin’athgul had told him.

  They were anchors for each other now, a pair of circling stars creating gravity between them. Tanis suspected they would be able to find each other no matter what impossible distances separated them—across the realm or even on other worlds, through time itself. Even as he and his parents could.

  When Tanis had realized that his parents were still bound to him and he to them, his entire view of existence had changed. So many answers had been waiting for him behind the veil that had protected his identity.

  And when he’d reached out upon their binding and spoken to his mother…oh, the things she’d told him! He was still trying to make sense out of much of it, putting context to some things and filing others for future reference, in some instances just trying to conceive of the possibility…

  Nadia’s sudden laughter drew Tanis’s attention to where Pelas was making illusions to entertain her. It reassured him to see color returning to the princess’s cheeks, to find her sitting up so easily on her own.

  After their mad escape from Shail’s underground temple, Pelas had drawn deyjiin out of Nadia’s life pattern, and Tanis had Healed the results of its destructive touch, but her lifeforce had been drained nearly to an ember. She’d needed time to regain her strength.

  They’d all needed time—to recuperate, regroup, reclaim a sense of themselves and each other. They hadn’t spoken about what would happen when they did finally return to Faroqhar, as they must, and soon. The Sormitáge would probably still be up in arms from the attack at the Quai game, never mind that the Empress’s heir was missing.

  And while these shadows lay across the path just behind Tanis, he sensed an even darker storm looming on the horizon. The Danes were obviously planning some sort of revolt—Shail had kidnapped countless Adepts for some purpose, after all, but Tanis had no idea what the Malorin’athgul was truly planning. Felix’s fate also weighed heavily on Tanis’s conscience; had his friend survived the explosion that had caught them both? Yet what sat most unresolved for Tanis was how he’d put Nadia in harm’s way by involving her in his and Felix’s investigation. He suspected Balance wasn’t finished making him atone for that grave error in judgment.

  A fluttering unease always accompanied this thought.

  “Don’t tell me that’s actually you there in the painting.” Nadia leaned forward to better study the illusion Pelas was crafting for her, a reproduction of one of his paintings from the Sormitáge. “That’s you…” she gave him a disbelieving look and pointed to a figure wearing an elaborate damask coat and wide-brimmed hat, “right there?”

  “Doesn’t the coat give him away?” Tanis murmured.

  Pelas eyed Tanis humorously. That day the Malorin’athgul was wearing a violet coat that brought a vibrant gold hue to his coppery gaze. “I painted myself into many of my paintings—somewhere inconspicuous, of course, just to see if anyone would notice. It was a game of mine.”

  Nadia shook her head. “To think all of those years I studied your paintings and wondered about you, the great artist Immanuel di Nostri, and theorized on your muses, and tried to imagine what you looked like, and you were right there all along, just…smiling at me.” Nadia shook her head wondrously. “Did anyone ever notice?”

  Pelas winked at her. “A very few.”

  Nadia had been somewhat awed to learn that Pelas was Shail’s brother, but when Tanis had told her that Pelas was better known as the artist Immanuel di Nostri, her jaw had dropped. She’d thereafter insisted on calling him Immanuel, which made Pelas smile, as he was smiling just then.

  Nadia exhaled a contented sigh. “Will you show me another one, Signore di Nostri? I’ve never seen such artfully crafted illusions.”

  Pelas chuckled. “I fear your praise will go to my head, Princess. Soon I will become fat with it, and then none of my hats will fit.”

  Nadia flung a daisy good-naturedly at him. “I’ll buy you as many new hats as you like.”

  Pelas gave an indulgent sigh. “Very well, Princess. For you, another, and hats be damned.” He refreshed Nadia’s goblet from a decanter of wine, then reclined on one elbow and blessed her with one of his devastating smiles. “What would please Your Highness this time?”

  Nadia settled her goblet in her lap. “Something…different.” She glanced to Tanis, inviting his opinion. “Something we’ve never seen before.”

  “Something you’ve never seen before…” Pelas ran a forefinger along his lower lip and gazed thoughtfully off. “This would imply some place you’ve neither been nor witnessed by way of an artist’s hand. For an artistic connoisseur such as yourself, this means we must travel far indeed. Ah…” the finger lifted in a moment’s inspiration, “I have it.”

  Pelas’s gaze lengthened, as though across the shimmering ocean. The only indication he was concentrating at all was a slight tightening around his eyes. Then a scene began forming, superimposed before their canvas of blue ocean and cloudless sky.

  First appeared the knotty trunk of a vast, white tree. Next followed many fat limbs. But as the illusion became more solid, blocking out the view of sea and sky, Tanis realized he wasn’t looking at a tree, but at a city crafted in the shape of one, with building stacked upon building, tower growing from tower, until the branches of streets angled off in countless directions. Doors and windows, arches and rooftops gave the trunk its bark-like texture, while hundreds of white twig bridges connected the branching streets and buildings in a leafy sprawl.

  Nadia clapped her hands. “It’s magnificent. It even has fountains—oh, Tanis isn’t it glorious?” Nadia exhaled a dramatic sigh of appreciation. “What I wouldn’t give to have such an extraordinary imagination as yours, Signore di Nostri.”

  Because he shared the Malorin’athgul’s mind, Tanis understood things Nadia could not. The lad met Pelas’s gaze. “Where did you see it?”

  Pelas smiled, a soft acknowledgment of the truth Tanis had percevied. “In Shadow.”

  Nadia froze her goblet halfway to her lips. “In Shadow?” She turned a look between the both of them. “But I thought…” Then she frowned.

  Pelas angled her a wry smile. “You thought Shadow was a black nothingness, bleak and devoid of existence?”

  “I certainly did.” Tanis pushed up on one elbow to better look at him. “Phaedor said Shadow was a dimension and that it had no where, nor even a when.”

 
Pelas vanished the illusion of his tree with a flick of his gaze. “Your zanthyr could likely explain Shadow far more adroitly than I can. My understanding is experiential.”

  “But you’ve been there?” Nadia asked. “You’ve seen this tree city?”

  “Indeed, Princess.”

  She gazed wordlessly at him. “A city in Shadow, but…who lives there?”

  An odd expression flickered across Pelas’s face. “I’m not sure anyone lives there. Taerenhal belongs to a Warlock named Rafael—if it still exists.”

  Tanis pushed his thumbs to the bridge of his nose. All of the images and thoughts suddenly swirling through Pelas’s mind were starting to hurt his head. “Gah,” he looked up under his brows. “I can’t make sense of anything you’re thinking.”

  Pelas grinned at him. “I’ll explain what I can, little spy.”

  He refreshed all of their goblets and then rested an arm across one bent knee. “Calling Shadow a dimension seems correct to me, for it has no substance save for what the Warlocks give to it. Shadow is…energy bound into illusion solidified into form…sometimes—that is, if the Warlocks have chosen to make things solid enough for others to perceive them. When you travel in Shadow…” his gaze took on a faraway look, “…no, it’s not so much traveling as shifting. Imagine you’re sailing in a bank of fog, and then—quite without warning—an island appears in front of you. In those moments, you’ve merged with a Warlock’s…world seems an inapt term to describe the universes shaped by their minds. Their worlds are not like this one.”

  Nadia was listening intently. “Long ago, in the time known as The Before, the Warlocks of Shadow came regularly to Alorin—thousands of years ago, when most of what we understood about elae was superstition, before we made contact with the Council of Realms, before Cephrael bestowed upon the First Emperor Hallian the truths of the Sobra I’ternin.” She gave a little frown. “They were dark times for the realm.”

  Tanis remembered the Imperial Historian Maestro Greaves lecturing on The Before, but he couldn’t recall the historian saying why the Warlocks of Shadow were no longer broadly terrorizing the realm. “What stopped the Warlocks from coming here?”