The Web Rulers Weave: Ruins of Unity

by J Glen Percy

  “The cells,” Gabryel repeated through a cloud of thought. He turned suddenly towards the door.

  “Gabryel wait. Where are you going? You can’t possibly think of hiding her there. She’s a princess!”

  Gabryel did not stop. “I think I know where Breccyn’s been. This is his mess to do the heavy lifting anyway. We can talk about where once I’ve found him.”

  “Gabe, listen to me. Ceres isn’t the only dangerous Romerian.” This time Gabryel did pause, the severity of his brother’s tone leaving no option. “This isn’t like hiding nabbed sweet rolls from mother. The queen is a proper villain.”

  Gabryel reached out, squeezing Mykel’s shoulder fondly, and Mykel once again saw his brother’s new-found maturity.

  “How many nights did I stumble home from the Ward while father was gone to the aqueduct?” Gabryel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mykel replied in confusion. “Six or so?”

  A fiendish grin appeared on Gabryel’s face, nearly wrecking the mature façade. “I hide things a lot better than you credit me for. Our own mother didn’t even notice that my arm has a new hole in it. Keep the latch locked from the inside. I’ll be back shortly, with Breccyn or without. Then you can tell me all about the queen.”

  Mykel’s heart raced as he dropped the door’s foot bolt behind Gabryel. He was anxious about staying with Cecily, though he agreed that someone needed to keep the door locked. He was much more anxious about the rate at which he was accumulating dangerous secrets.

  “I’m sorry,” Mykel said softly, returning to Cecily’s side. He read the cloth message again, imagining the scene that had caused such wounds. What were they going to do?

  Reading through the note for a third time, Mykel was startled by a heavy rattle. His eyes shot to the locked door but all was still. Somewhere nearby, a door closed on its hinges. Mykel’s coursing blood did not slow. In fact, the familiar voice coming through the wall had it pumping faster and faster.

  * * *

  “Just tell me which boy it was, Gerrit,” the queen said firmly. The broad-shouldered lord knew every coming and going in this town; she had a difficult time believing he did not know which twin had traveled to Whitehaven. Not every man was ignorant, though the rare few that weren’t could still play at it well. Lord Fairfield was among the best.

  Returning from their cliff side stroll, the man shut the guest quarter’s door behind them.

  Willa had an even harder time believing he would protect the Starlings, and not that he cared for the Romerians either. The one name had unseated his family, removed royalty from their veins, then replaced them with the other. He was a longshot for whatever information he held. Rushed recipes disgraced the cook though, which meant she needed to know which boy it was before exchanging coin with a cutthroat. This one-time prince was certain to know.

  “Supposing I did know which boy was where on what day, Your Grace, I do not see that it proffers me to divulge such information.”

  “Favor with your queen is your profit.”

  “The way I see it,” he replied, “I am much more valuable when you don’t know what I know rather than when you do.”

  Knowing eyes searched the queen and she resisted the urge to move her hands to her belly. He didn’t just play ignorance well, he was brilliant in all manner of political maneuvering. The Five curse the man, how much did he know? He likely knew what was wrong with Aryella Starling that had had her mother leaving the Queen of Cairanthem on the doorstep like a palms-up monger. He might even know of Lord Redmond’s murder by now – hawks could race the wind itself – but he couldn’t possibly know why or by whom. Could he?

  “You see, Your Grace,” Lord Fairfield continued, tapping his skull with a sausage-thick finger. “Like cutting a flatworm in two, divided secrets have a way of multiplying. Supply soon outweighs demand and what I hold up here plunges in worth.”

  Willa pursed her lips into a pleasant smile, concealing her aggravation. There was a tightness to her voice that she could not control however. “And sometimes the information within, shared or spared, is worth the head itself.”

  * * *

  Gerrit Fairfield grinned widely as he strolled from the guest apartments. He had played Willa’s game and in process, learned far more from her than she had hoped to learn from him. For one, her daughter’s condition was still unknown to her. And a good thing, that. That particular worm was a parasite no matter how he cut it. Bad for business, one might say, and a serious threat to his arrangement with the Starlings.

  Now there was a thought. Instead of cutting the worm, why not shower it in salt and shrivel the secret all together? A dead princess might be preferred to a permanently disfigured one. It would have to wait. Knowing that Gabryel Starling had participated in that particular dilemma, the most potent conclusion Gerrit had arrived at in conversation with the queen was that Mykel Starling knew something of her visit to the North. Something she was willing to kill for. Something of great worth.

  CHAPTER 28

  Ceres Romerian’s anger rattled the unsteady lid that, for the moment, held his boiling temper fast. The prince stormed towards the guest quarters with murder in his eyes, cursing the bare ground, the brackish air, and the vivid blue sky if it looked at him wrong. He shook a dirt clod from his boot. Had these mucking mongers never heard of stone?

  And damn his worthless men and their ale-anchored appetites. Corralling a herd of geese was easier than leading this lot. Besides Allis, not one had roused when the girl Wart came with tidings of his sister earlier today. The fact that the weathered tracker was rarely seen without a brown, cask-fed drink in his hand was surely responsible for the man’s immunity to the self-induced illness ailing the rest. Allis certainly hadn’t abstained last night. Curse his saturated veins anyhow.

  “Is it not your job to hunt the missing?”

  Allis took a nip from the tin flask hanging from his neck as if to emphasize Ceres’ thoughts. “Aye, tis. Though I am unconvinced that’s what she is, Your Grace. You saw the Starling lad.”

  “What I saw was your hilt against the scofflaw’s head, and before we had anything useful out of it. Some tracker, stopping the trail cold.” Ceres knew it was his own frustration speaking. He had seen Allis work, watched the man find foxes when the hounds couldn’t. The rain coming in sideways on one particular outing, flooded shale cliffs crumbling beneath hoof, the cornered fox likely didn’t know where it was. Yet there sat Allis lazily atop his roan gelding, outstretched finger pointed down the hole.

  “Forgive me, Your Grace. I believe I stopped a war.”

  Ceres’ brow raised. “Oh?”

  “You don’t need the priesthood, bless the Five, to see the consequences of murdering the lord steward’s son in his own home.”

  “I only wanted to teach the monger a lesson in addressing royalty. Nothing quite so permanent as death.”

  “Blood on your brush would paint war in the realm, mark my words,” Allis replied.

  “You’re a flaming hero,” Ceres responded dryly.

  “I should think knighthood and a parade through the fountains of Rosemount will do by way of reward.”

  “Ha.” Ceres’ bark was not so lighthearted. Allis was undoubtedly competent, but you could not bridle a mule and call it a thoroughbred. A king’s order of knights reflected on the king himself. “How about sparing your neck for jeopardizing my sister’s search?”

  Allis seized on the forgiveness, however thin it might be. “We will find her yet, Your Grace. The gods owe you a favor for taking in the mud-footed critter, and me for leaving her tongue in her head. News of the princess is the only cordial utterance I’ve heard from that one.”

  Ceres had initially taken Wart’s dubious information for some plot. She was as fiery as her hair, and as intent on putting a dagger under his ribs as he was on finding Cecily. Breccyn Scofflaw’s confirmation of her tale had come as a surprise. So too had the discovery of Ceres’ own dagger.

  How had the assassin gotten
their hands on the blade? And never mind that Ceres agreed with the intended outcome. Face down on the table with a lump on his head was surely less than the scofflaw deserved for his crimes. If Cecily did not turn up soon, face down in the duff by the very dagger he had escaped is where Breccyn Scofflaw would end. Too many things were disappearing and reappearing within Shorefeld’s walls.

  Allis carried on as they stepped up to the row of ocean-facing doors. “I’d sooner toss her from these cliffs with the last of my mug than look at her twice, but there’s not a soft bone in that one’s body. She’d likely crawl from the crater and dust herself off. Tough as cowhide, my gran used to say.”

  Ceres’ lips separated in the slightest of grins despite himself. He hadn’t staked it down prior but that’s precisely what he appreciated about the unpredictable girl. As Ceres asked after the princess, at the stables and again at the smithy, he had received more starts and gasps than actual words. It was a common problem among commoners. Wart would have told him straight.

  “Tough as cowhide and ugly as the heifer,” Ceres agreed. “A monger with the stones to back their speech is a rare thing.”

  “No offense meant, Your Grace, but are you certain it’s not the manner in which you approach the unmarked? You’re not exactly the most inviting.”

  “Do you ask a dog to sit, Allis? Or a horse to trot? You command them. It’s the quickest way to separate competence from inability, the useful from the ineffective. I’ve traveled this kingdom and seen more bare-wristed commoners working hard to hardly work than fleas in an idler’s beard. Something in their fiber that a few decades of Unity has not cleansed.”

  “As a point, I said the girl was tough, not useful. If you find that in the mutt, do let me know.”

  Each man stood outside an elaborately carved door, entrances to the guest suites on the other side. Ceres ignored the old tracker.

  “You’re right, Allis. I would have killed Breccyn Scofflaw had he drawn steel. The only thing worse than a monger is a monger with a title. A rodent with its nose in the air.” He finished by spitting on the engraved doorframe. “These rooms will be heaped full with that particular brand of uselessness. I will not rest until I have turned this city over for Cecily.”

  Smirking at Allis’ polite knock, Ceres tried his own locked handle only once before throwing his full weight into the ornate oak barrier. The latch gave on the second heave, and it became immediately clear that he had discovered some slanted scenario. A wounded figure, feminine in form, rested beneath a pile of blankets at center floor, her marred face exposed. A young boy whom Ceres recognized as a Starling twin backed hurriedly into the farthest corner. Ceres’ eyes went back to the covered lady. The living did not lie so still.

  “What do you know, a monger with a title,” he muttered, stepping into the stately room.

  He had not made a full step when he realized what the monger lordling’s saucer-sized eyes knew to be true. There lie his sister, Cecily of house Romerian, eldest Princess of the Rose, stained and dead on the floor. Beauty disfigured, magnificence disgraced.

  Tears surfaced before Ceres had fully grasped the scene. Devastated tears. Livid tears. The moisture from his mouth must have fueled them because his tongue and lips felt like he’d dined on desert sand. For the moment, his sister’s undignified position struck much deeper than her physical condition.

  “Your princess lies on the floor, monger.” He ground every word through a veil of searing rage, his chest heaving under the exertion. The boy stammered, as Ceres had come to expect from all mongers. “Your princess lies on the floor!” he repeated.

  The boy glanced to the open door, tears of his own dripping from a quivering chin.

  “Expecting someone? Your father? Your brother? Your pet ghost? They cannot save you.” His watery vision distorted the room and everything within. Everything save his dead sister.

  “Pick her up.” His voice was one stone grating over another. The boy moved naught. “Pick her up, and carry her to a bed. Pick her up!”

  The Starling boy jumped to obey, his flesh milk-white and textured like a plucked bird’s. Ceres had moved dead bodies before; the strength was not in the boy. But neither did he find sympathy as the terrified boy strained against Cecily’s lifeless heft. Disgust fueled his fury. A princess of Cairanthem, his sister, laid to rest on a splintered floor.

  Just then, the boy stood and fled for the exit. Fled for his freedom. Waxing Crescent appeared as if from nowhere, causing the air to sing in a horizontal arc. The ancient blade moved through flesh and bone like an oar turned sideways through water, though the prince’s speed and precision prevented the blade from knowing wetness like the oar. The boy’s head nearly reached freedom, rolling to the threshold and the open air beyond. His spiritless body did not make it so far, and the patterned rug beneath drank his life fluids eagerly.

  Mirroring the lordling’s head, a ball of cloth rolled from the boy’s relaxed fingertips. Falling tears smeared the charcoal letters as Ceres deciphered the already worn message. His sister had been rescued according to her plea, but not saved. This is why Breccyn Scofflaw hid Cecily. This was the note he had wanted to produce. Gabryel Starling, whom the scofflaw said held the message, was now dead for it.

  “No sign of her at this end, Your-” The tracker’s words caught in his windpipe as he rounded the apartment’s doorsill and took in the grisly sight. Not even a living, breathing Feral had done that to the man. Allis frowned. “Apologies, Your Grace. I did not know you’d found her.”

  “Found who?” came yet another call, a woman’s, from out on the wide deck.

  Jerked from his stagnant loathing by the newcomer’s familiar voice, Ceres dashed by Allis to the apartment’s entrance. There, he ran into the last person he expected, and just in time.

  “Mother? What foul scheme brings you here?” he asked, blocking her path.

  “Foul scheme? I was heading to Rosemount by way of Shorefeld hoping to find you. And here I have.” Willa studied her son questioningly. “What is wrong, son? I heard shouting.”

  Somewhere bordering rage and cloudiness, Ceres knew his eyes could not lie. Better then to divert. “Nothing good will come of your presence in this city, mother. You must leave, and now.”

  Willa’s confusion multiplied as she tried to look beyond her taller son. Allis had appeared in the doorway. “I’ve only just arrived,” she said. “I have unfinished business here.”

  “We all have unfinished business here, I assure you. Business that will not be concluded in short order. Allis, see my mother safely south. I will gather the men and follow after.”

  “You presume to order your mother, the queen?” Willa demanded.

  “I presume to protect her!” Ceres snapped. “And all Rosemarked under light and shadow. For the time, it requires our retreat from this place. We will be back. With father’s blessing and might, we will be back. Now go.”

  Though surely not satisfying, Ceres’ words were compelling. His queen mother nodded, grabbing him by the face and kissing his forehead. “Be safe, my son. If we do not meet on the road home, I will see you once there under fairer skies.”

  “Under fairer skies,” Ceres echoed.

  Allis and his mother departed, and Ceres returned to the quarter’s receiving room. Kneeling by his beloved sister, the well of suppressed moisture surfaced once more. Through the back windows, Ceres could see all of Shorefeld reaching down the slope beneath a cheerful sky of blue. He imagined flames raising everything to the ground, an impenetrable cloud of black boiling towards the blue. What hell had Cecily come through to arrive here? Ceres would have the answer when he returned for Breccyn Scofflaw’s head.

  Reaching under the blankets, he took his sister’s hand for what would be the last time. Unexpectedly, it was still warm. Then, thin as mountain air on a winter’s morn, a breath came.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Can I not return home to peace and stability?” Ryecard asked sharply. Seldom did he raise his voice against h
is wife. Seldom did he have reason to. Having arrived in Shorefeld not an hour prior, he had found more than enough.

  “What are you saying, Lord Steward Starling? That I am ill-fit to raise our children?”

  “Events and aftermaths say that, not me,” he snapped. Shadows beneath her eyes and hair out of place, Meryam appeared exhausted and frail. No doubt in consequence of keeping their daughter’s bedside day and night. Her tone did not reflect her appearance, however.

  “How dare you place this on me. I suppose it is easy to show up now and again to see your rules broken without having to enforce them yourself. Is this not your desire? A shackled daughter you can keep an eye on at all hours until marrying her off to the highest bidder?”

  Sitting at their bedside, Ryecard exhaled his frustration. “A daughter who can keep her toes out of trouble is all I ask. And a mother who would see it so.”

  Ryecard should have expected this. Lore’s every hoof beat on the long road home had been plagued by oddities and ill-omens.

  In a small community called Dun not half a day from Rosemount’s outermost wall, he had overheard a few village locals talking about the lord steward and his scofflaw son. Riding cloak drawn – not that he expected to be recognized this far south – his hand was on hilt ready to draw steel. He would not suffer insult among his own people, especially not now that the king had absolved Breccyn. Only, it was not an insult. Praise was on their tongues, Breccyn Scofflaw’s name raised aloft from Dun to King’s Fork as a cry against tyranny and a leader of independence. To Ryecard, it was just as sickening.

  His son’s name was not liberation’s only call. As Erick had spoken within the Rose Citadel, the golden stallion greeted him at every turn, spilling from window fronts or raised to the unfettered prairie breeze. He winced. How long before the golden stallion was known as the Scofflaw’s banner? More concerning was the green and blue that whipped and lashed alongside the Starling flag. Old Braemar was on everyone’s lips, its colors on everyone’s home. Revolution was ripe, and the provincial-born ready for a feast.