Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Trell stared at her.

  “We must away, she-cat.” Rhakar was already in his saddle. “We travel in haste. Timing is key.”

  Trell turned and eyed him silently. If you know that timing is key, then you clearly still know more than I do, but with a final glance at Vaile—both of farewell and gratitude—he swung into Gendaia’s saddle and gathered his reins.

  Rhakar led them fast away into the dawn.

  Sixteen

  “Most people miss Opportunity because it is carrying a shovel and looks like work.”

  –Yara, an old Kandori woman

  When the moment came, Felix di Sarcova was engaged in a dream, wherein a dryad was guarding a node he wanted to travel and requiring three pleasures of him before she would let him cross. Being that she was a nymph and thereby very beautiful, Felix was all too happy to bow to her wishes.

  He was just leaning in to give her the first of what he hoped would become many kisses, when a forceful presence disrupted the dream. Actually, it felt more like an iron hand reaching into his dream, taking him by the throat and yanking him out into the waking world—with no regard whatsoever for his mind’s current occupation.

  Felix roused sputteringly into darkness and batted desperately at the iron hand fastened around his throat. Only…his efforts met with empty air, so he opened his eyes to see what had actually awoken him.

  A pair of emerald eyes were glowing above him like two great green moons.

  Felix sucked in his breath and sort of crab-crawled backwards and into a semi-seated posture with his spine wedged painfully against the headboard.

  The eyes seemed unmoved by this impressive retreat.

  “Wh—who are you?” Felix looked around for any other disembodied eyes glowing in his room.

  “Get dressed, Felix di Sarcova.” With the deep voice, akin to a purr but echoic of a growl, a tall form materialized out of the darkness, shape filling in its proper place around the emerald eyes.

  “Shadow take me.” Felix’s mouth fell open. “You’re…why, you’re Tanis’s zanthyr!”

  “I am Phaedor. And your window is closing.”

  “My—” Felix spun a look at his open window. Then he understood. “Oh, I get it.” He nodded wisely at the zanthyr. “You meant that metaphorically.”

  “There was no metaphor in ‘clothe yourself.’”

  Felix just stared at him, both fascinated and slightly unnerved. “Have you come to break me out?” He’d lost count of the days he’d been forced to keep ill company with the dust in that forgotten room. Suddenly a new hope flamed inside him. “Did Tanis send you? Did you rescue him, too?”

  “Tanis is walking his path, as you must do, Felix di Sarcova.” The deep voice around those glowing eyes gave an eerie imagining to what Felix’s path might entail. “Doubtless you would prefer to walk it clothed.”

  Felix frowned at him and slowly climbed out of bed. He tried to reassure himself that the zanthyr obviously wasn’t there to harm him—he could’ve done that easily enough without bothering to wake him up—but it was hard to commit to the idea with those glowing eyes watching him so unnervingly, as if they already knew all of his secrets.

  He was just reaching for the light on his bedside chest when every lamp in the room flamed to brilliant life.

  Felix winced in the now too-bright room. Shading his squinting eyes with his hand, he turned back to say something and saw the zanthyr in the light. The words froze on his tongue.

  Tanis hadn’t been exaggerating in describing him. The zanthyr was damned impressive.

  Tall as a horse—no, a rearing bear. Okay, maybe not one of those ice bears they had stuffed in the Imperial Menagerie, which all the governesses took their charges to see when they were still young enough to be awed and inspired by the vast diversity of the realm’s fauna, but which outing had only resulted in Felix and his brothers pretending to throw different types of animal scat at each other and chasing around terrorizing the Menagerie’s other visitors, but in any case, really tall—and dressed all in black leather.

  He was also very intimidating, and bloody good looking. Tanis had failed to mention that. Somehow it had been easier for Felix to imagine Tanis’s zanthyr as being fierce and menacing, but finding out he was ridiculously handsome to boot—that just rubbed salt in the wound.

  Felix finally noticed that he’d sort of wedged himself between the bedside chest and the bed frame while he’d been staring at the zanthyr. Tanis had told Felix he could trust Phaedor, but the way the man was looking at him, sort of oozing danger from his boots to his wavy raven hair…Felix wasn’t so sure.

  He wetted his lips. “Tanis…uh, said I could trust you.”

  The zanthyr made a dagger appear in his hand and started flipping it into the air. “He did, did he?”

  Felix eyed the dagger uncertainly and licked his lips again. “Unconditionally.”

  Phaedor arched a brow. “That is quite a commitment to make on my behalf.

  “Okay, maybe he didn’t use that word, but he implied it.”

  “You may unconditionally trust in the Empress’s ire if you make her wait for your arrival.”

  “Okay, all right, I get it.” Felix dropped to his knees on the floor and hunted around beneath the bed for his pants. Finding them, he sat and flopped his feet up and down while pulling them on. “So…where is Tanis?” He paused with his pants around his thighs. “I mean, you must know, right? Tanis said you know everything.”

  “I see Tanis has been filling your head with his ideas.”

  Felix eyed the zanthyr speculatively. “But you’re not denying it.”

  The zanthyr flipped his dagger, making it spin three times before catching it by the point. “If a man says the sky is green when it is patently blue, what need to argue? The man is clearly mad.”

  “So…that’s a yes, then?” Felix felt as tense as cat on a fence with barking hounds on both sides, and the zanthyr watching him from between the strands of his wavy hair—so like a predatory cat marking the progress of its prey through the veldt—well, that just wasn’t at all helpful. “Will you just tell me this one thing?” Felix gazed up at the man, praying Tanis had been right in all the things he’d said about him. “Do the Danes have Tanis?”

  The hint of a shadowy smile might’ve twitched on the zanthyr’s lips. He flipped his dagger again. “Not at the moment.” Then he fixed those unnerving emerald eyes on Felix, making him feel very much pinned in his sights. “But the Empress may yet turn you over to them if you make her wait.”

  Felix choked on a swallow. “You mean—she really—” he scrambled to his feet and pressed himself back against the bedside chest. The Empress was summoning him? “You mean that wasn’t just some metaphor I wasn’t supposed to understand?”

  The zanthyr looked him up and down. “She would prefer you presented yourself to her suitably clothed, but—”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point!” Felix looked frantically around for his tunic and finally spotted it under the table. He rushed over to it. “It’s just that Tanis said you talked in riddles.”

  “Riddles.” The zanthyr arched a brow and followed him with that unnerving gaze. Felix just couldn’t escape from it. The zanthyr’s bloody gaze was taking up so much space in the room that Felix could hardly think around it.

  “Okay, maybe he didn’t use the word riddles.” Felix snatched up his tunic and thrust his head through the opening. “I think his exact words were ‘cryptic and elliptical truths you won’t understand and probably would rather not know.’” Shirt donned, he looked around desperately for his belt.

  The zanthyr nodded towards the corner.

  Felix saw his belt cowering there and felt a unique kinship with it. He ran over and grabbed it up, whereupon a thought occurred to him. He stilled with his hand on the leather.

  Straightening slowly then, he looked over his shoulder to the zanthyr. “Why did you come for me?” The words sounded a little broken and embarrassingly shrill. Felix cleared his
throat. “I mean…why not the High Lord’s men, or the Empress’s Praetorian? Why not anyone else?”

  The zanthyr did smile at him then, a dangerous sort of smile, full of mystery and insinuation. “At last, Felix di Sarcova lands upon a question worth asking.”

  Felix waited for him to expound upon this comment, but the zanthyr merely eyed him through the veil of his wavy hair and flipped his dagger again.

  “But not worth answering, I take it.” Felix frowned down as he fastened his belt around his hips. “I seem to recall Tanis saying you could be…”

  Phaedor arched a brow by way of inquiry into exactly what he could be.

  Felix scowled at him. “Never mind.” He started looking around for his boots.

  The zanthyr pointed his dagger helpfully towards the opposite corner where Felix saw his boots peeking out from beneath his crumpled cloak.

  Felix padded over to them. “Obviously you didn’t come here to answer a bunch of my questions.” He glanced at Phaedor for confirmation of this fact as he reached his boots. “Why then?” He sat down while mumbling through the possibilities, “Not to question me—that’s a certain text. If you know everything already, what need for that tedious undertaking?”

  “Verily.” The zanthyr flipped his dagger.

  Felix frowned at him. “Tanis said you were sworn to protect him, but that you also were there to keep him on this path—whatever that involves. But you said just a minute ago that I had to walk my path…” Felix was trying to shove his foot into his boot without undoing all the buckles, so his voice sounded somewhat strained as he continued, “…but having a path implies you’re walking it, kind of regardless of what you do. So that can’t be why you came for me.” He grunted as he finally forced his foot all the way in and dropped his heel on the floor. Then he lifted his mismatched gaze to the zanthyr. “Can it?”

  Phaedor grinned and flipped his dagger.

  Felix reflected that the zanthyr was really skilled at unapologetically not answering any questions. He got his other boot on more easily and grabbed his cloak with one hand as he stood up. “So…?” He straightened and looked to the zanthyr.

  Phaedor arched a brow at him.

  Felix shifted on his feet. “I mean…is that why you came? To put me on my path?”

  Phaedor nodded towards Felix’s satchel, which was lying on the chair by the window. “Lest we forget the coach to carry you upon this path.”

  Felix did a double-take at him, and his breath caught. The intimation in the zanthyr’s tone…how could he possibly know that the satchel was his Nodefinder’s coach? Yet this was undeniably what he’d been implying.

  Worse…and this really gave Felix pause, such that he nearly missed a step as he was making his slow way across the room to claim said satchel…did the zanthyr somehow know about the book?

  By the bloody Sanctos. Felix took up the strap of his satchel and slowly slung it diagonally across his chest. Then he looked down at himself and grimaced at his disheveled appearance. “I wasn’t expecting to be summoned into the presence of the Empress when I put these clothes on.”

  Phaedor caught his dagger by the point and pinned his striking gaze on Felix. “No indeed, Felix di Sarcova, you and Tanis were expecting to catch a tiger with a snare designed for a rabbit.”

  Felix felt this pinioning truth spear him. He dropped his head, and a hollow feeling opened in his chest. “If I could undo—”

  “You shall have your chance for atonement.” The zanthyr started towards the door with his long black cloak floating at his heels. Felix stood rooted, thinking of Tanis and Nadia, and even poor Malin, and what a bloody irreconcilable mess they’d made of everything.

  The cell door swung open soundlessly before the zanthyr’s approach. He paused and looked over his shoulder at Felix. “Offer the Empress your contrition, and she will meet it with steel. Offer her truth, and you may yet find an opportunity for redress.”

  Felix stared at him, contemplating meeting the Empress with a pounding heart and a mouth gone dry. Most people went their whole lives and never even saw the Empress, save perhaps from a million heads away on the day of the Solstice, when a figure like a tiny diamondine stick waved from a cupola atop the dome of the Summer Palace. And now he was going to stand before her and…what? Be charged with treason? Or worse, blamed for taking the Princess Heir out of the palace?

  Suddenly the zanthyr seemed like a guard come to escort him to the gallows.

  As if reading of this thought, Phaedor flashed a predatory smile and strode from the room.

  Felix made haste to follow. He trailed the zanthyr down a long, vaulted passage that looked more like it belonged in a mountain castle than a prison tower. It had to be late at night—or he supposed, early in the morning—but they passed a lot of guards, who mostly tried not to look at them, or to not look at the zanthyr. And they passed a lot of spies trying to look like normal people, but normal people actually slept at night, so Felix wasn’t fooled. Finally they descended a mile of stairs and left the Tower, with Felix all too happy to never visit again, and headed across a plaza beneath an open, starry sky.

  About halfway across, Felix saw silvery portals blink into existence everywhere and heaved a shuddering sigh of relief. He wasn’t sorry to leave the dead spot forever behind either.

  Yawning prodigiously, Felix dared another glance at the zanthyr, who walked at his side like a towering statue formed of shadows. The man was certainly an enigma, just as Tanis had claimed. But then, most anyone would be an enigma if they never said a damned thing except ‘indeed’ and ‘is that so?’ and ‘hurry the hell up.’

  Looking away again, he observed more to himself than the zanthyr, “Tanis thinks of you like a father.” He rubbed his nose on his sleeve and took a deep sniff of free air. It smelled suspiciously of old bourbon and garlic, likely a result of the taverns on the far end of the square. “Not that he said those words exactly,” Felix amended, sniffing again, “but I could tell. And a good father, mind. Not like my father, who changes wives with the seasons and forgets which progeny belongs to which dame. He better remembers the names of his bloody hawks than his own offspring.” Felix shoved both hands through his hair and scowled at the moonlit pavement stones in front of his boots. “He treats his hawks a good deal better than his offspring, too.”

  “Hawks learn faster than boys and are quicker to obey.”

  Felix spun the zanthyr a look. “Yeah…” Hearing the too familiar phrase unnerved him all over again. “That’s exactly what my father says.”

  The zanthyr shot him a sidelong smile, elusive and dark, the image of himself.

  Felix scowled down at the pavement.

  Yet…even with how uneasy the zanthyr made him, Felix still felt like he could trust him—likely as a result of Tanis having spent so much time talking about him. But Tanis had also said that the zanthyr reflected back at people whatever they put out towards him, which bothered Felix, because he wasn’t feeling the same trust coming from the zanthyr. Phaedor seemed to regard him more like a bear observing a squirrel that had the misfortune of finding its way into his lair—and the bear was taking its time deciding whether to leave the squirrel to its own harmless devices or squash it for its personal entertainment.

  Felix pondered this all the way across the piazza, through a soglia’re and into the Imperial Palace, where his mental explorations began more resembling justifications, especially as he started noticing how so many places inside the palace looked familiar, which put his earlier explorations on Faroqhar’s twisted nodes into a rather rattling new perspective.

  They were walking down a marble-drenched passage Felix was supposed to have never seen before when he posed, “But if the squirrel finds its way into the bear’s den, he’s still only following his path, right? I mean…did the squirrel really have a choice, if all of its decisions along its path are preordained?”

  The zanthyr eyed him askance. “The Empress no more subscribes to destiny than she will find any conceiva
ble justification for your hopping around the Sacred City on twisted nodes.”

  Felix nearly missed a step. He gulped a swallow instead. Unlike Vincenzé, the zanthyr wasn’t fishing for a confession. He knew.

  “Sancto Spirito.” The oath barely made it across his lips, his breath had fled so fast. “I’m doomed.”

  “The future is an empty landscape, Felix di Sarcova.”

  Felix looked up to find the man staring knowledgeably at him. “So you’re saying I’m…not doomed?” He screwed up his face with the effort of trying to decipher the zanthyr’s cryptic intimation. “You’re saying our paths aren’t fixed?”

  The zanthyr looked ahead again. “The future is unfixed, for few men are actually creating it. Most are focused solely on the now, the evident, the pressing. Many cannot see further down time’s curve than the length of their gaze, and the majority no farther than the edge of their boots.”

  “So…that’s a no, then.” Felix scratched his head. He wasn’t sure how this point was intended to help him.

  Maybe it’s not. Tanis had explained that sometimes the zanthyr just said things to see how people would react to them. Apparently he did this to the High Lord di L'Arlesé a lot.

  Felix didn’t much like the idea of being the squirrel that the great bear was just toying around with. In hindsight, he wished that he might’ve come up with a different metaphor to use in framing their interactions…

  But you’ll want a bear at your side when you head in to battle Shail’s tiger.

  Felix turned the zanthyr a startled look, for the thought hadn’t at all seemed his own. It finally occurred to him that while the man walking at his side both distracted and unnerved him, Phaedor actually knew what they were up against. Felix was no longer alone in understanding the truth—in fact, Phaedor doubtless understood it far better than Felix and probably even Tanis did. Felix realized that in the zanthyr, he had a powerful ally.

  They were walking a chequered marble floor across a wide gallery where four hallways intersected when Felix asked, “Are we going to go together to rescue Tanis?”