The Queen of Storm and Shadow

by Jenna Rhodes

  JENNA RHODES

  THE ELVEN WAYS:

  THE FOUR FORGES (Book One)

  THE DARK FERRYMAN (Book Two)

  KING OF ASSASSINS (Book Three)

  THE QUEEN OF STORM AND SHADOW (Book Four)

  Copyright © 2017 by Rhondi Vilott Salsitz.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Jody A. Lee.

  Jacket design by G-Force Design.

  Book design by Elizabeth M. Glover.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1756.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698176133

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  In memory of Charles P. Ervin, gone far too soon. He was my daughter’s husband, my granddaughter’s father, and our son and brother. He loved sports, music, books and movies, had an impish sense of humor and a great empathy for his fellows. To say he is greatly missed cannot express the loss.

  Dedicated to:

  James, for coming home and promising to visit more often.

  Stuart, for joining our family and bringing hisown wonderful family with him.

  Acknowledgements to my incredible friend, editor, and publisher Sheila Gilbert, in partnership with the estimable Betsy Wollheim, and a grateful thanks to all the rest of the awesome DAW staff. Couldn’t do any of this without you. Another round of thanks to all my readers for their interest and support.

  And to the cats, because . . . well . . . cats.

  Contents

  Also by Jenna Rhodes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Glossary

  Prologue

  Kerith

  “HE ASKS ME to tell the truth, and yet all Vaelinars are liars. That’s how they raise their fortunes, and that’s how they inevitably collapse, taking all of us down with them. He cannot put himself out there, so he asks me, Kerith-born, to do it for him.”

  Lily placed her hand over her husband’s. He could feel the calluses from the looms on her long and slender fingers, as well as the strength within them. She squeezed lightly, so as not to crush the letter he held. “Would you count our Rivergrace among them?”

  “We raised her differently. She’s one of ours, Dweller down to the bone, with the good sense any of us have. She just looks Vaelinar.” His mouth skewed a bit to one side, bringing the wrinkles that aged him to prominence. He brushed the palm of his hand over his salt-and-pepper hair and took a deep breath.

  “And what about Lord Bistane? He’s as good a man as we can find, he and Verdayne, both Bistel’s sons, and the late lord—rest his soul—raised them in his footsteps. They are all good men.”

  “I won’t haggle that with you, most especially when you’re right. But, woman, you know it as well as I do, with the rest, untruth leaps more easily to their lips than truth. They are more untrustworthy with it than a trader with your gold.” He waved his pipe about. “The lot, even Lariel, rest her soul, wrap their tongues about lies any time it favors them to do so. And we live and die on truth, Lily. We don’t use magic to build our homes and protect our families. We do hard, honest work.”

  “You can walk down the street to the pub and be hard-pressed to prove that.”

  “Bah. What do you want of me?”

  “He asked you to tell the truth.”

  “Bistane asks the impossible of me, and he should know better. A Vaelinar doesn’t know veracity. He can’t carry it in his heart or his blood or his senses. And his asking will get us all killed because they do not like it when their dark underbelly gets exposed to the light.” Tolby Farbranch smashed the letter in one hand, knuckles turning white. He did not care for being enmeshed in Vaelinar politics; for all that he had friends and allies within the high elven, those trusts and entanglements would cost him his family. Since the day that sorcery had blasted its way into his world and deposited the lot, they’d done nothing but cause trouble. True, they’d brought wonders with them, magics and knowledge, but so interwoven with tribulations that he questioned their worth. The Dwellers were practical folk, their neighbor Kernans wanted to profit and explore, and the Galdarkans had been left to their own devices, nomads who ranged the continent after the Mageborn who’d made them self-destructed in magic-wrought wars. Vaelinars, though, that lot wanted to rule the world almost as badly as the Mageborn had. “What truth? His? If I’d done what Lord Bistane wanted, stayed with Lariel so that she could have her heir near, we’d all be dead, slaughtered in Larandaril. This letter tells me that. Do you think the assassin started with just one room in mind? No. He undoubtedly watched and observed the manor for days before he went
in, looking for the children and us first before he went after the Warrior Queen, but we weren’t there for him to find. I left in spite of his protests, but I was right, curse it, I was right! I’ve lost one daughter to their damned schemes and now Bistane warns me I might lose Nutmeg unless the truth comes out. Tressandre ild Fallyn is openly moving on the throne again because she can, because Lara sleeps in an endless night. It’s been out, Gods curse their truth. They’ve taken Nutmeg before to get at the throne. They’ll do it again.” The farmhouse trembled with the thunder in his voice. Dust motes skittered and danced with the force of his gesture.

  Lily slid her hand over his fist. “Don’t you think he knows that? But the ild Fallyn hide in corners and shadows, and we can take that away from them.”

  “Bah. You and he—you think they’ll scuttle away from the brightness. They’re like any other pest. They’ll hide until the shadows return. They live on hatred and bitterness, and they’ll not relent until every cursed one of them is gone.” The tenseness in his shoulders did relax a bit as his wife leaned her head on him. “They are Vaelinar,” he reminded her. “They are born to power and live to treble their birthright. Only this isn’t their world. It’s ours, but they cannot live quietly in exile.”

  Lily half-smiled. “If it were you, Tolby, you’d never go quietly.”

  “Never! Not until I had my family and world back.” He caught himself and cleared his throat. His voice lowered. “Too right you are. I would not go quietly.” She turned his fist over and opened his fingers for him.

  “Then you might start by telling the truth as we know it.”

  He opened the crumpled paper between both hands, smoothing it down. “My way.”

  Her smile blossomed wider. “I do believe that’s what Bistane had in mind.”

  “Devious Vaelinar.”

  “Aye, and he’s one of the best, the ones who shared better ways to farm and create and educate our minds. They’ve shaped the way we live today. They didn’t know how they came here or why for hundreds and hundreds of years. They thought they were lost and now they know they were exiled. High elven or not, I pity them for that. History is one of the greatest teachers, and theirs was torn from them. No wonder they’ve stumbled so here while trying to find their way.” Lily raised her head, kissed his cheek, and crossed the room. She paused at the threshold. “But they’ve always met their match on Kerith, and always will. We Dwellers thrive on stubbornness.” Still smiling, she left him alone in the room to do as he would, knowing he’d think on her words.

  Tolby chuckled then, and kicked out a chair to sit down and read the letter again. He swept his desktop clean with one arm to make way, sending papers ruffling to one side and rattling the inkpot.

  He would start, he thought, by reminding his audience that his daughter Rivergrace and her man Sevryn disappeared from the battlefields of Larandaril in hopes of stopping the master of death Quendius as he strode from one world to another with an army of Undead slaves at his heels. She stepped onto a bridge of light and magic, heading to another world which had swallowed her up and not given her back. He would remind them of his loss, because they’d all had losses, and would understand. He’d give them the truth as native born on Kerith knew it, and hoped that would sate Bistane’s intentions. And then, then, he would offer them hope, if he could only think of how he could do that.

  Chapter

  One

  Trevalka

  I STAND HERE ON A BRIDGE on a world where I was never born, remembering my name is Rivergrace, and holding onto myself as hard as I can. This bridge does not span across water; it arches between worlds. At my heels follows my warrior and the love of my life, Sevryn Dardanon, because I whispered to him “Follow” and he did. We are come from a battlefield in the sacred valley of Larandaril, on a world called Kerith, where our friends are fighting and dying, but this bridge, this rift, from one world to the next will destroy all who survive the war. I have no choice but to pass. I led him through betrayal and sacrifice, through skill and slaughter, through the just and the unjust, through victors and losers to this point where all bets are placed and all destinies weighed. As I prepare to look these Gods in the eyes, and see the ancestors of the Vaelinar—haughty, proud, magical beyond belief, and entitled parents of those exiled who do battle behind me, I realize that I can’t do what I set out to do crossing these worlds. I am lost. Sevryn won my heart and my life long ago and now, I fear, he must win my soul. But first he must tear it from the being who weighs me now.

  When the Cold Lady of Death claims you, it’s said she lets your regrets parade through you so that you can face and embrace each one and put it to rest. Dwellers talk little of their Cold Lady, but they respect her. There were a few who held some disdain—the Cold Lady comes often for those born of Kerith, and rarely for the elven Vaelinar. I don’t know the face of Vaelinar death, though their blood runs in my veins. I am Dweller raised and loved after they rescued me, and they are my family, save for this true love of mine. The sight before me frost-burns my eyes as well as my soul as Death holds me tightly.

  I can feel my heartbeat slow until it barely registers, each thump a painful spasm in my chest, the sound of it spun out into threads. Each thread lingers only to be caught up in Death’s icy hand to be examined, spider silk floating on the air anchored by a tremulous touch. I can feel the slightest breath on my strands, each one as if plucked by fingers of steel, stretched to their utmost limit and then released like a shot that vibrated inside my being, threatening to shake me apart. The moment stretched to unbearable limits until I thought I might die again. Then the Lady examines the web of souls I have anchored about me, my feeble attempt to protect what life and mortality they have left. She strokes their strings as she has mine, and I feel each quaking thrill shock throughout me.

  The Cold Lady looks at me one way and the other, head tilted, eyes blacker than a moonless night in examination. “What are you?”

  “I am Dweller.” My voice rasps in my throat. I cling to my memories as a Dweller, spinning out laughter and love, sunlight and harvest. “And I am Vaelinar.” Pearls of moments lanced by magic and love and hatred and betrayal stab through me.

  The Cold Lady drops her hands from the weavings of my life and says, “I will visit you again. Remember.” She strips away my sense of self, leaving my soul unbalanced and spinning like a toy she has been tinkering with.

  She steps aside, the wake of her movement thrusting me across the bridge toward another impasse, this one beyond her domain of Kerith. My heart starts to beat in rhythm again, but I have no way of knowing how long it will last this time. My steps freeze between worlds.

  Chapter

  Two

  SEVRYN SET HIS SIGHT on the back of Rivergrace’s shoulders, crossing what felt like a simple plank bridge, albeit shaky, under his feet. The sound of war behind him shushed to a muted roar as the smell of a salt marsh, replete with bird dung and other strong aromas, filled his nostrils. A heavy mist billowed into the air about them until he could see nothing beyond her slender form, and even less to either side of himself. The smell of the salt marsh bled from him, only to be replaced by the sharp and acrid smell of burning Raymy carcasses, far less pleasant. It coated the back of his throat with an unpleasant oiliness that went far beyond his sense of smell. A hacking cough rose as if offended, and he stopped to clear his throat. By the time he could wipe his streaming eyes and swallow again, the smell had whisked away. A fragrance neither awful nor wonderful drifted across him as he hurried to catch up with Grace, but he needn’t have bothered, for she had stopped still on the bridge, mist roiling about her.

  He stared at her, imprinting in his mind the many changes since he had last been with her. Always slender, she looked even thinner, but underneath that there was a hardness of frame. Her garb looked both rough and ancient, her boots borrowed and ill-fitting, her lustrous chestnut hair tied back with a scrap of fabric she might have torn from the slee
ve of her colorless dress.

  His jaw tightened. He did not want to think of what she might have endured at the hands of Quendius and her deranged father. He’d suffered under that yoke once himself, nightmares of slavery at the weaponmaster’s forge he’d buried in his past. They had left the stink of Cerat, the soul-drinking demon, all over Rivergrace and in the cage of tenuous threads that covered her like a spiderweb of black-and-gold gossamers. If he reached now to touch her, he would feel a faint thrill of answer from those threads, lives which Quendius claimed for his own Undead but which she still held in thrall to her. The demon caused that; his power through hers that tethered the souls and anchored them to her own, but did she feed it—or did it feed her?

  He had never seen sorcery which could create those Undead who had followed Quendius across the battlefield of Larandaril but had no doubt it existed—he had seen Quendius bid the dying to follow, and they had. He hadn’t seen the leashes woven until Rivergrace touched him and opened his eyes, and then made a similar lead from her heart to his. That magic had nothing to do with the Undead, and glimmered now between them, filled with light and life, not like the strands caging her. He wanted to slice through the bondage and watch it slip away from her, yet knew that no knife he could wield would sever that cage. Sevryn only knew that it imperiled her—if not now, then soon. She needed him more than she knew. And still, she did not move on the path she’d asked him to follow, frozen as if a part of her had died there.

  Did Quendius and his Undead block their way? The assassin guild of the Kobrir had trained him well, but he wasn’t prepared to face an unknown horde. Not yet. He had to study what drove them, what they were vulnerable to, and what mortal traits if any they retained. He couldn’t let Rivergrace throw herself into an attack now. He could not sense them and he told himself that if the hulking weaponmaster waited in the mists ahead, he’d know it. He’d know it by the clenching of his gut and the dryness of his throat, by the prickling of the hair on the back of his neck and by the narrowing of his eyes as if they sensed a target to focus upon. He’d know it beyond a shadow of a doubt, even with heavy fog between him and the Vaelinar he hated most in life. Soot-skinned and silver-eyed, coarse and mean, the man had been unstoppable, but Sevryn knew that their time drew near. For once and all, they would meet again. For Rivergrace’s sake, if not for the whole world left behind them.