Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  The kinetic river swarmed around them, ever trying to rip Arion from his anchors, or rip his anchors from their grounding nodes. Fighting amid that rushing stream would be a test of all of his skill.

  Arion tightened his hold on his blade and readied himself. “They say he who laughs last, laughs best.”

  “You will not be laughing when I claim your consciousness for my own use.” The Enemy’s dark eyes licked over Arion. He felt their touch as the cold, sharp edge of a blade slicing along his flesh, even as he felt the man’s daggers of compulsion stabbing for a hold on his consciousness. “Soon, you will know no laughter but that which I command from your throat.”

  Arion raised his blade with both hands. “Thrilling, to be so underestimated.”

  The Enemy lifted his lip in a snarl. Their weapons clashed in a geyser of sparks.

  On the bed of the realm’s kinetic river they fought, striding across sands of power, raising the silt of the second strand in their wake. Every clash of their blades made ash of the lifeforce, clouds which were quickly ripped away on the currents. Every step dragged against Arion’s anchors while the current continuously tried to rip him downstream.

  Arion bobbed in a delicate equilibrium of forces, even as he bobbed in the cosmic Balance, caught in a channel of opposing tides. Choices…choices spiraled…and ended. Their paths were too short, nearly concluded before they’d begun. The choices whose threads still extended far into the pattern of consequence had dwindled to a scant half-dozen. Arion misliked all of them.

  He’d only brought their battle onto the Pattern of the World as a stopgap, a borrowed moment to strategize his next play, but the sheer force hauling upon his consciousness—never mind the Enemy, the Pattern would be the death of him!

  The Enemy’s spiny tentacles of compulsion resumed their efforts to overwhelm Arion’s fourth-strand shields. Every breath became an effort of will, as labored as that of a beleaguered swimmer caught in a riptide.

  Arion clenched his jaw and swung again for the Enemy. The latter avoided, parried and struck back. Arion caught the blade overhead on his own and swung out from beneath it, striking as he turned. The Enemy met Arion’s blade with a downward stroke of his weapon and slung him off balance. Arion recovered with a curse and plunged back to engage him anew.

  The Pattern of the World tore at both of them…

  —the dream shifted—

  Kaleidoscopic light bombarded Arion, a deadly concoction of compulsion woven through with deyjiin. Every touch of it speared his mind. He tasted the blood of his own thoughts dripping dying life onto his tongue.

  He could barely see, barely think. Fragmented patterns clogged the currents; the ashes of hope clogged his lungs.

  He and the Enemy tumbled together on the raging current, locked in a deadly embrace.

  He’d had to sever two of his anchors. It was that or lose his fourth-strand shield altogether and succumb to the Enemy’s compulsion.

  Perhaps…had he just been fighting an immortal who wielded elae, had the Enemy not also wielded deyjiin…Arion might’ve stood a chance. But to endure the continual dual bombardment of these conflicting and polarizing powers…

  Deyjiin was attacking every particle of elae—furiously, agonizingly, each molecule engaged in its own war for dominion. The very air was combusting, fusing, exploding.

  The myriad strands of choice had become two.

  Dangling amid that rushing river, clinging to the last of his anchors, Arion knew which one he would choose. It was impossible for him to choose any other. He saw this now. Perhaps this is what Isabel had always known.

  The Enemy clung to him with iron hands while his mind clawed hooks of searing ice into Arion’s mental shield. The raging tide of the Pattern of the World ripped at both of them.

  Arion might’ve released his anchor and ridden the tide to a safe harbor, but to think of letting the Enemy walk free…to abandon the game when there was still a chance to turn the tide…to simply turn his back on the First Law…

  Arion! Isabel’s mental call along their bond cast a spear into his heart, even from so great a physical distance, even with the Pattern of the World raging around him.

  I’m sorry, Isabel. Arion steeled his will against the compulsion patterns bombarding him and his heart against the woman he loved. You cannot stay with me for this. He couldn’t think of her, couldn’t think about what he would be losing if he failed. To do so meant losing the battle then and there.

  Arion closed his mind to the woman he loved and chose his path.

  *—*

  Ean woke with a low groan mumbled into the mattress and flopped over onto his back. Now he remembered why he hadn’t been sleeping. He threw an arm across his eyes and lay for a time, trying to push off the misery of waking to the realization of what he’d done.

  He’d long suspected that Arion had knowingly abandoned Isabel—the idea had haunted him from the outset—yet he’d never imagined that in this same choice he’d also been abandoning his son.

  Isabel, we had a son?

  Ean exhaled a tremulous breath and pushed both palms to his eyes. Shade and darkness…why hadn’t she told him they’d had a child together?

  Probably because your son died centuries ago, having never known his father.

  It seemed the likely truth. Isabel only withheld things about his past to spare him pain, and if his son had still been alive…

  No, it was too torturous to ponder other scenarios. The joy Arion had known in that part of the dream still felt too visceral, too exhilarating and new. Ean shoved the memories aside out of self-preservation and tried to find something less tormenting to think about.

  It took quite a while.

  Finally, he found his way back to the confrontation with Darshan and the strange confluence of paths at the Prophet’s temple. The Princess Heir of Agasan, two Malorin’athgul, Tanis of Giverny and himself…somehow all of their paths had intersected in that place. Or at least, well…he’d crossed Tanis’s path by extension through Pelas and the Princess Nadia van Gelderan.

  Ean exhaled a slow breath, marveling at how far-reaching was Björn’s game…how spiraling all of their paths! He’d never imagined that the innocent young truthreader traveling among his company might be a Player in the First Lord’s game, yet if the lad was mutually bound with a Malorin’athgul, how could he be anything else?

  Ean couldn’t help wondering what circumstances had driven Tanis all the way across the Empire to meet the Princess Heir. And by what strange twists of consequence had Tanis gained the binding troth of Pelasommáyurek, for whom Isabel had sacrificed so much? Trying to envision the possible connections boggled his mind.

  Yet it seemed appropriate somehow. Tanis was special—anyone could see that. He’d gained Ean’s affections from their very first meeting—far more deeply than Ean had realized at the time.

  But for Tanis, he’d let Pelas live. For Tanis, he’d set aside his own grievances, forgone vengeance in Isabel’s name—thirteen hells, for Tanis’s sake he’d even allied with the man who had tortured and bedded his wife! Ean pushed both hands into his hair and gave an explosive exhale. What wouldn’t he have done for the lad?

  And yet…whatever lay between him and Isabel, Tanis and Pelas—these relationships weighed against each other in the balance of sacrifice—it also felt right that Tanis’s welfare and happiness should prove more important to him than his own.

  After a lengthy argument with his body about the need to do something beyond lying very still, Ean finally roused himself into an upright position. It took another round of contentious discussion before he could make himself get out of bed to ring for the inn’s staff.

  They attended him quickly once he removed the warding from the room.

  As he was breaking his fast to the accompaniment of cicadas singing to the evening beyond his open balcony doors, Ean pondered his meeting with the Prophet.

  Now that he had the mental capacity to inspect his and Darshan’s interaction, Ean rec
ognized several truths he’d been unable to acknowledge at the time. Of fundamental importance: what if the currents had not been lying about Darshan?

  He simply hadn’t wanted to believe what he was seeing. What was that Kandori saying? ‘The eyes will not see what the mind does not want.’

  Yet it was a sure truth that Darshan had been leading him around Dore’s wards and keeping him beneath the notice of Marquiin and Ascendants alike. Darshan’s whispered compulsion had brought Ean directly to his location without rousing any alarms—or would have, if Ean hadn’t finally defied its directions.

  But why?

  The more he looked it over, the more Ean got the uncomfortable impression that Darshan had carefully managed his visit to the temple for a specific purpose, one that had little to do with his activities as the Prophet. It wasn’t lost on Ean that Dore Madden had been conspicuously absent.

  Another thing Ean hadn’t wanted to admit at the time: the patterns surrounding the first two temples had been belching a continuous sludge into the currents, but the currents around Darshan’s temple had run clean.

  If the Prophet’s patterns were a view into his intentions, why weren’t the same patterns extant in his residence? Why weren’t the currents in that place roiling and riotous?

  ‘The currents will tell you what is true.’

  Isabel’s words, an axiomatic fact. If the currents weren’t lying, then Darshan’s patterns, and the patterns Ean had long associated with the Prophet Bethamin, were not synonymous.

  He recalled what he’d observed of the man. Darshan had barely spared a glance for the Marquiin who’d been with Nadia; he couldn’t have cared less that one of his own was helping her.

  But if the Prophet wasn’t outraged at Ean, why the relentless pursuit? Why all of the attempts on his life? Why take Ean’s men hostage in order to lay a trap for him? Darshan hadn’t seemed at all concerned about the things Ean had done. But someone cared. Someone wanted Ean dead. Someone was taking vindictive pleasure in making monsters out of men, orchestrating atrocities in the name of a god. Someone was running things at the temple of Tambarré.

  Ean was starting to think that someone wasn’t the Prophet.

  He sat back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck. His pondering had delivered him to the edge of a question: What if the attempts to lure and kill him were serving a purpose beyond Dore’s personal vengeance? What if each of the attempts to kill him had really been misdirection, feints to make Ean look everywhere to find his enemy but at the one true place where the enemy resided?

  His troubles had all begun the moment he returned to Dannym, but clearly someone had been working against him lifetimes before that point. What if someone had recognized his life pattern pressed on an invitation all those months ago? And what if, in that recognition, that someone had known him as Arion Tavestra and a potential enemy ‘Come and find me. I’ll be waiting.’—and taken steps to eliminate him, while himself hiding in the shadows of other men’s hatreds?

  And it had worked. Ean had only been looking at the arrows shooting towards him, or perhaps at the archers firing at him, but he’d never thought to look for the man who’d given the order to fire those arrows.

  Suddenly, this all seemed so clear to him. So self-evident.

  All this time he’d only been looking at his own pieces on the board. He needed to start looking at both sides of the board. He needed to understand the Player sitting across from him.

  The Enemy.

  Thus far, Ean had faced three Malorin’athgul. That left but one face to the Enemy: Shailabanáchtran.

  …Come and find me. I’ll be waiting…

  And Shail had been waiting, each time Arion had Returned; waiting to destroy him again, and again, and again.

  This time had to end differently. This time Ean was determined to make new choices. This time, he couldn’t fail, or there would be no more future for any of them in which to act.

  Ean knew one thing unequivocally: in all of his confrontations with Shail, whether he’d won or succumbed boiled down to one simple truth: Shailabanáchtran worked deyjiin. If Ean couldn’t work that power, if he couldn’t learn how to apply the Laws of Patterning to it, he would never be able to defeat Shail. To imagine any other outcome was lunacy.

  Ean knew three men who could potentially teach him.

  Asking the First Lord seemed like a step backwards, a move off the field onto the sidelines and out of the zone of play.

  That left the zanthyr, and Pelas.

  While he packed up his things, he planned.

  His brother and Dareios waited for news of his success, but he’d find neither teachers of deyjiin nor opposing Players by rejoining Sebastian in Kandori.

  At some point during his adventures in Tambarré, one of the steps he’d taken had set him on a path that forked firmly away from his brother; indeed, looking at the pattern of consequence he was treading now, that path he’d walked beside Sebastian seemed to have ended even before he left Kandori. Ean knew he couldn’t now return there and still hold his position as a Player.

  So…he would send word to Sebastian and Dareios of the success of their matrix. They could move forward with the plans they’d already devised in pursuit of Isabel’s task.

  But that left him…where?

  With the whole world on the lookout for you. Dore’s two hundred talents had seen to that. No city in the Middle Kingdoms would be safe for him with that kind of price on his head.

  But Ean didn’t intend to remain in the Middle Kingdoms. He couldn’t—not if he meant to learn how to work deyjiin.

  He knew where he had to go, but first, he had one last thing to do.

  The prince picked up his sword and looked it over. As his unfortunate foray with Sheih had proven, the eagle-carved crossguard with its sapphire pommel stone was easily recognizable, and anyone who knew a Kingdom Blade could identify him by it. Carrying his blade for the world to see had dumped him onto Sheih’s path. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  He dared do nothing to alter the weapon itself. The zanthyr had laid patterns all through the steel when he’d remade it into a sentient blade, and some of those patterns Ean still didn’t understand. But the identifying hilt…this he could change.

  He focused first on the grip and crossguard and permeated the metal. Verily, in his mind, he became the metal. He knew its innate composition as if it were his own; he saw how the molecules of energy had been bound into form.

  These he shifted with a thought—darken—and the hilt became as grey as the storm clouds over the sea—a little of the detailed molecular restructuring Arion had been so fond of. With a bit more layering of form, Ean morphed the design of the hilt and cross guard so it resembled a phoenix more than an eagle.

  For the pommel stone, he formed a clear thought in his mind of the effect he intended to achieve—the First Law; Markal would’ve been so proud—but rather than impelling the thought, forcing the currents to comply, Ean let his intention sort of float away, as a toy boat set upon elae’s tides. Gently, quietly, the intention whispered along the currents until it had infused them with intent.

  A twisting spire of smoke appeared within the sapphire’s core. Dancing, spinning, it drew the rich color of the stone into its depths. Indigo waned to cobalt, cerulean to sky, until only the faintest glisten gave memory to the color it had once been.

  In place of the sapphire, an incandescent stone remained, water-clear, emitting a faint, cobalt sparkle when it caught the light. It very much reminded him of Isabel’s eyes. Perhaps that vision of her gaze had been his true inspiration for the stone.

  His job complete, Ean flipped the weapon around and caught it by the hilt. It was hardly recognizable now, even to his own eyes. He assessed his work with a sense of accomplishment, yet with a pang of sadness as well.

  His Kingdom Blade had been his last physical tie to the family that had birthed and raised him, yet it had never been more clear to him that his path lay with Isabel and Björn.
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br />   Like it or not, wherever it might lead, to tragedy or victory…across betrayal’s dark moors and whatever trials lay ahead, their path was his path, their game was his game. Not simply because Arion had chosen it—though Ean was doubly bound to it because of Arion’s choices. No, this was his path because he knew the consequences of not walking it, and those weren’t consequences he was willing to live with.

  Ean gave one last look around his room. Then he sheathed his blade, slung his pack up over his shoulder and set a course for the Pattern of the World.

  Fifty-one

  “Legends and facts are not meant to coincide.”

  –Dareios Haxamanis, Prince of Kandori

  Minutes, as the river runs.

  Trell jerked his britches up over his damp skin while envisioning possibilities of intent, defense, counterattack and retreat and feeling every heartbeat too keenly. He was donning his shirt when a rustling in the trees made him jump for his sword. He swung it around just in time to pin Rami at the point of his blade.

  His young valet froze with towels in hand and misgiving luminous in his startled gaze.

  Trell exhaled an oath and lowered his weapon. “Run to Raegus. Tell him to sound the alarm. Men are coming.”

  Rami dropped the towels and sprinted back the way he’d come.

  Trell belted on his sword and jammed his feet into his boots. Speculation crowded up against the urgency already pressing on his thoughts. Whose vile intentions had the river overheard? They were only days from Khor Taran. Was this a force of Nadoriin come to eliminate them before they could threaten the fortress? Saldarians finally seeking revenge? Or bounty hunters hard upon the scent of one of his expatriated princes?

  Trell reached for his cloak—

  Trell of the Tides!

  He sensed them in the same moment he perceived Naiadithine’s warning. Trell drew his blade and spun.