She had, after all, called this place home for seven years.
Sarpella landed gracefully near a bulging hill of rock, next to which lay a cave. The dragon cocked her head at the mouth of the cave, its black maw an indistinct shape.
I remember leaving that cave for the first time, Sarpella said, spitting out the carcass of a dear she had been carrying for an hour or so now.
Oriana was taken aback by Sar’s words. Doubt and uncertainty had kept her from making but a few concise observations on the flight here. “That’s right,” Oriana said. “You were scared at first, too. Like you’re scared of speaking, but you got it over quickly and learned that new experiences are quite fun.”
Yes. Oriana waited, expecting Sar to continue, but the dragon did not.
Horace climbed down off the saddle. “I don’t know that I’ll ever be accustomed to the back-and-forth of human and dragon. It’s confusing.”
“You can hear her just as I can,” Oriana said. “What’s confusing about it?”
“The fact that dragons can speak.”
Horace yawned and looked to the mighty spire of Haeglin, a mere mile outside Oriana’s former estate. On this night, the spire looked like a nondescript jut of earth, its features blurred and obfuscated by dark clouds smothering the sky and moon. They could have arrived five days ago, but chose to wait for a new moon so they’d have a greater chance coming in undetected.
“Hopefully they didn’t see us,” Oriana said, untying several riding satchels.
“Doubtful. We’ll know by morning at any rate. Get her in the cave and yourself to sleep. I’ll wake you in a few hours to take watch.”
“I slept this morning,” she said. “You haven’t closed your eyes in two days.”
With a watchful gaze still fixed on Haeglin, Horace sat on a lump of rock. “I’m used to it. Go, sleep.”
Oriana wouldn’t argue the point further. She did feel tired, and her mind often bloated with anxiety and irrational thoughts when fatigue settled in.
“Come on, Sar, let’s… is that a dragon skeleton?”
“Blame the Keeper,” Horace said. “He had a hand in killing it almost a year ago, when you fled your estate. At least that’s what he told me.”
Oriana had been told about this so-called Keeper twice now and still had no inkling who he was or why he had been at her estate. She’d find out more about this mysterious man later, but for now, sleep sounded quite enjoyable.
She took herself and Sarpella deep within the cave, into the den far below. The torches she’d always kept lit had long since blown out or ran empty on oils. The double-chain doors leading into the den were still there, though, and so too was the unappealing stench of dragon waste.
“Sorry, Sar,” Oriana said upon hearing the scraping of the dragon’s scales along the walls and ceiling of the cave. “You’re not as small as you used to be.”
It’s okay. It feels nice on my scales.
“Like a massage?”
I do not know. I have never had a massage.
Oriana held open the chain sheets, allowing Sarpella easy entry into the den. There they settled and talked of old times. Mostly Sarpella asked questions about her life here, the things she couldn’t remember. Oriana answered them in earnest, happy that her big girl was talking.
Sleep took them both a short while later. Oriana awoke with a start, feeling a hand on her shoulder.
“Sun’s up,” whispered Horace. “Ready yourself. I’ll be outside.”
Oriana yawned and went to acknowledge him with a tired grunt, but Horace had already departed the den. She sat up, wiped the crust from her eyes and yawned some more. However many hours she slept wasn’t enough.
Sarpella lay stretched out, legs splayed, tail curled to one side. She whimpered and kneaded with her talons. Oriana wondered what kind of dreams she was having. Hopefully bad ones, because no one enjoyed being woken in the midst of blissful dreams.
“Sar,” she said lowly, a soothing hand on the dragon’s snout. Sarpella’s single visible eye inched open, a thin band of azures and sapphires glinting out, centered with a big black pupil. “I have to go. The deer you left above will be enough for you?”
Yes, Sarpella said.
“Good. I’ll return as soon as I can. No longer than a week, I promise.”
I will sleep.
Oriana smiled and nuzzled her head against Sar. “You do that.”
The plan had been put together days ago. Sarpella would stay in the den until Oriana was named queen of Haeglin. Then she’d address the people of Haeglin, tell them who she truly was and what she had done—that she’d saved Avestas once already, though her treasonous sister likely hadn’t told them. Sarpella would be welcomed into the city, ogled at and gossiped about, undoubtedly, but over the days and weeks, she’d earn the people’s trust. Just like Oriana would.
That was the plan, anyhow. Regrettably, nothing ever seemed to go according to the plan.
BASTION CURSED THE RAIN. It made his ankle ache, which gave him a limp. Cripples don’t gain respect in this world, he thought. Normally he’d spend most of his time behind a desk or table when it rained, but on this morning he had pieces to move, pieces to put in place.
He met with Olyssi Gravendeer shortly after dawn, under the vaulted ceiling of the throne room.
“Pastries should be out… now,” she snapped, turning her head in the direction of a servant standing throneside. He jumped in surprise, almost dropping a plateful of berries that Olyssi picked at. “Where are they? How long does it take to plate a dozen cakes and wafers and… am I asking too much? Do you think I’m being too hard on you?”
She’s in a lovely bloody mood, Bastion thought. “Sweets aren’t necessary. I haven’t eaten in the mornings for thirty years.”
“A custom in the North?”
“No. I just prefer not to shit before noon.”
Olyssi grinned. “Does it work?”
Bastion shrugged. “Sometimes. How do you bear sitting in that painful, incommodious and thorny chair?”
“I’m the queen,” Olyssi declared. “It’s my throne. And I like the way it looks.”
Of course you do. You like the way it intimidates.
“Ah,” Olyssi said, clacking her nails together, “here they are. Take them back. Lord Bastion here does not partake in breaking his fast until noon. And these berries were unripe and ruined my appetite. Get them out of my sight.”
The servant who’d walked in carrying a silver plate of golden-brown pastries arranged in a circle bowed his head and wheeled around, likely thankful his visit with Olyssi had been cut short.
Bastion called him back. “My good man, come here. Lay your pastries down. Today will be a long one, and the furnace needs fuel.” He patted his portly stomach and winked.
Olyssi slouched to one side of the throne. She scowled at the servant beside her. “The fruit, I said, is unripe. Why are you still here?”
“Sorry, milady,” the man said, skittering away.
Olyssi rolled her eyes as the servant disappeared behind a faraway door. “Worthless at times. Slightly useful at others.” She wrung her fingers and slouched to the other side. “I’ve been up all night.”
Bastion pulled up a seat at the long table. “Worrying?”
Olyssi chewed the side of her finger like it was a cob of corn. “Why would Gimble Rivace assassinate Maya Plommen?”
Bastion had pinned the crime on Gimble, one of Olyssi’s most trusted and supposedly loyal Jackals. This was mostly because Gimble had nocked the arrow that had killed Maya Plommen. Olyssi thought him loyal, but in truth, he was simply a man who would do most anything for gold and infamy. Though he now sat chained to a rusted anvil at the Peak—Haeglin’s idea of a dungeon—Bastion had promised him his freedom.
“I just don’t understand it,” Olyssi said.
“Quit trying to,” Bastion said. “Does it matter now? Perhaps madness took him. Or maybe he had bigger plans in mind, plots to unleash. He’s impris
oned, and the queen of Plorgus is dead. The latter is what should trouble you.”
“It does. Maya was supposed to have returned to Plorgus tomorrow. If word of her assassination hasn’t reached their walls yet—”
“It surely has. It’s all the people here have been talking about, and you can’t clam up an entire society.”
There were shadows under Olyssi’s eyes and bags around them. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for days. Her fair complexion had turned ruddy, cheeks scaly and dry and scabbed over from nervous picking.
She looked tiredly at Bastion. “They’ll want revenge.”
“I would too, if I were them.”
“But I did nothing wrong. I’ll give them payment. Gold, wagons full of it. They deserve that, probably. But I did not assassinate their queen. It was a… a mistake.”
Bastion moved the plate of pastries closer to him. He took a wafer topped with cream and berries and stuffed it in his mouth. The fullness of cream and sweetness of berries and the crunch of wafer delighted his taste buds. It made him rethink his habit of skipping breakfast.
“Haeglin can easily topple Plorgus,” Bastion said, flicking away crumbs from his lower lip. “In an ideal world, that is.”
Olyssi squinted. “What do you mean?”
“You may be the rightful queen, and a damn good one at that—” He paused, allowing Olyssi to fully digest the compliments. The subtle smile on her lips told him that she had. “But you haven’t solidified your place yet. You’ve not given the people, much less your vassals and banners, a reason to trust you. A reason to believe in you. They want strength on the throne. Confidence. Someone who can lead them not only through the gilded ages, but through the rusted ones as well.”
“You’re holding back on something. Tell me.”
She can be perceptive when she wants to. “War is unavoidable. How you sell it to your people and your banners is not so rigid and inflexible. Blame Maya Plommen’s death on Plorgus.”
“What?”
Bastion leaned forward, forearming away the plate of pastries. “Claim you were the target of Gimble’s arrow, but that by divine grace or karma or any reason you wish, you were saved.”
Olyssi straightened herself on the throne. “Where’s the evidence? People want that sort of thing.”
“Then give it to them. Promise Gimble you’ll spare his life if he admits that Plorgus had turned him. That they had offered him a handsome reward for taking you out.”
“That makes him a loose end.”
“That’s why you kill him anyways. Does a promise count as broken if the man to whom you made it is no longer alive?”
Olyssi’s eyes glowed with an inner spark of mischief. “Oh, that’s cruel,” she said, a touch of delight in her voice. Her face suddenly softened. “Why Gimble? I just… I want to understand. I trusted him with my life, with my queenship.”
That’s precisely why, Bastion thought. Now you trust no one, except me. Bastion had nearly achieved total consolidation of power. This put him in a dangerous position. If he didn’t act on his newfound reserves of influence and control and authority soon, he’d make enemies—people who would sense he was growing too powerful too quickly.
Thankfully, he had Olyssi Gravendeer sitting on the Grateful Throne. It made his next—and final—step comically easy.
“I’ll talk to Gimble,” Bastion said. “I’ll secure his word. This afternoon we reveal Plorgus’s plot to the people of Haeglin and write to our—your—bannermen. Soon you’ll preside over your first war, Olyssi. And believe me, queens and kings… they’re molded from war. Sculpted from victories.”
She leaned forward, chin on her fist. “They’ll write songs of me.”
“Sonnets,” Bastion said, smiling. “I’d better get to work. Quite a few doings to be done today. And you, my queen, ought to relax.”
Olyssi rose from the throne. She stretched her arms and cracked her neck. “Only because of my faith in you will I be able to do just that. You’re a gem, Bastion Rook. And I’m so happy you’re my gem.”
She and Bastion went in opposite directions; she to her quarters and Bastion to the rain and muck of a gloomy morning. The guards posted at the inner throne room doors opened the enormous emerald wood doors and nodded to Bastion and as he limped past. He winced silently, the pain in his ankle sharp and sudden.
“Milord,” said a Jackal, standing at attention outside. “Commander Jauren wishes to speak to you. It is urgent.”
“So urgent that he couldn’t be bothered to stand where you are, waiting as you are?”
The Jackal pushed back his shoulders. “Sir,” he said, voice muffled behind his fire-gilded helmet, “the commander is at the barracks.”
Bastion grumbled and limped along, longing for his cane. He kept the cane in secret, using it to move about at night in the dim castle hallways, where he’d encounter only the sound of silence and the enclosure of walls.
While traversing Haeglin was an absolute pain in his ass, he appreciated the grandiosity of its architecture. Haeglin was built like a plump spire with jutting discs of rock for arms, of which it had four—two near the base of the city and two at the top. The city was split into five levels called rungs.
He climbed down a long unraveling of stairs from the fifth rung to the fourth and from there to the third rung, where walls of calcified mud edged the roads, rising to the shoulders of adults and looming over children. Away from the center of the rung, in their own district and culture, lay the barracks and armory and training grounds of the Jackals and city guard.
“How’s life treatin’ you, Fraggus?” asked a Jackal leaning against a masonic statue of a swordsman unsheathing his blade. The Jackal had a pipe sticking out of his mouth and his arm around his helmet.
“Wet and fockin’ soggy,” said another Jackal slogging through the flooded road.
“Comin’ to the lowlands by chance?”
“What for?”
“Commander Jauren tasked Captain Illun with recruitin’ some five hundred warm bodies for the city guard. Lowlands are rife with savages fit for the job.”
A woman dressed in a tunic and loose-fitting mail pushed a wheelbarrow to the man’s feet. Chiseled basalt stone lay in the bed, each chunk the size of a pumpkin. “Push it,” she told the Jackal.
He rose forward, tongue pushing against his cheek. “That’s a job for a wench like you.”
She cast a severe downward glare in his direction. She sniffed snot back into her nose. “You Jackals are all the same. You sit around sniffin’ each other’s arses, while us in the city guard keep Haeglin a functional kingdom. Does that piss you off? Go ahead, hit me.”
Bastion shoved his way through, elbowing the guardswoman and Jackal aside. “Be a shame if Commander Jauren heard there was infighting amongst his ranks,” he said, letting his words drift away as he continued on toward the barracks.
“Lord Bastion,” the Jackal hollered apologetically, “I didn’t see you there.”
Bastion ignored him but recorded the encounter in his mind. It hadn’t been the only confrontation between the city guard and the Jackals; it seemed the two were pitted against one another. He’d need to rectify that once the Grateful Throne was his.
Haeglin’s barracks centered the martial district like the sun frames the sky: all-imposing and pervasive. Its spongy, basalt walls angled off to form an octagon. An iron-riveted door stood beneath an arch upon which two crossed swords were affixed.
It began raining harder now. Bastion climbed the stairs leading up to the door, each step agonizing. The bones in his ankle felt like they were sliding against one another.
He went inside, stone-faced. Of all places, weakness here would not do. He’d soon command these men and women, and he needed their respect. Cripples did not get respect. Pity, yes, but respect? No.
The smell of fresh lumber greeted him. City guardsmen were pounding new supports into place and removing the old, rotted ones.
“My Lord,” one said, a pain
ed look on his face as he hugged tight to an unsecured support to keep it from shifting.
Bastion nodded and plodded through tangled corridors and hallways. Hammers striking steel sounded off in a nearby room, and jokes were exchanged in another. Eventually, Bastion made his way—slowly—to an emerald wood door. A plaque was affixed to the door.
JAMESON JAUREN
COMMANDER OF
THE MARTIAL FORCES
BASTION KNOCKED.
“Yes?” came a gruff voice.
“I hear you want a word with me.”
Bastion heard footsteps, then soon after a click. The door swung open, and a slender, rangy man framed the doorway. He had a thick bronze beard and saggy jowls. A high-fitting tunic covered most of the sags and folds of his neck.
Jameson Jauren ushered Bastion and closed the door behind him. He retreated to his desk, groaning as he sat down. Stacks of parchment lay in organized piles, and a fat candle flickered beside an inkwell and pen.
“One of my men saw Horace Dewn on the second rung not long ago,” Jameson said, wasting little time with small-talk. He was a no-nonsense man, and a busy one. Bastion liked that. The news Jameson gave him, however, was not so enjoyable. “Oriana Gravendeer was at his side.”
Suddenly, the pain in Bastion’s ankle didn’t seem so bad. At least in comparison to the pain in his chest. “That’s expected,” he said convincingly. “I invited Oriana here.”
Jameson’s brow inched upward.
“Olyssi was informed,” Bastion said. “In fact, she was giddy with excitement when I told her.”
Jameson leaned forward, fitting a fist into his palm. “You make my life difficult, Bastion. You weren’t here when Raegon Gravendeer was assassinated.”
“Actually,” Bastion said, finger in the air, “I was. I sat next to him at the table where he took his last breath. His blood spattered into my beard.”
“You weren’t here for the aftermath.”
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 23