Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (The Fey Series)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He picked up the nightdress and clutched it in his hands. The cotton fabric came from the base of the Eccrasian Mountains. It was rare and expensive. It was also warm, not from the fabric itself, but from the dream spell woven into it. Jewel loved the nightdress and had worn it for a year. She had had it made, she said, especially because she had no special magick.

  “Rugar?” The voice was soft, and male.

  Rugar looked up slowly, unwilling to be caught in this moment of vulnerability. A young Fey stood in front of him. He was slender and tall, and wearing the tunic of the Infantry. His left sleeve was ripped, and his arm hung free and useless. A stained bandage was tied just above his elbow.

  He took a step into the light. His face was smeared with blood, not like a Red Cap’s, but like a man who had been spattered in battle.

  “I’m sorry,” Rugar said. “I can’t place you.”

  “Burden.” The boy’s name seemed to weigh him with even more sadness.

  A friend of Jewel’s. One who had served with her and had cast an interested male eye at her. The one Rugar had hoped she would pursue first, before she decided on her mate, thinking an Infantryman would be good training for the life ahead. A chill ran down Rugar’s spine. He twisted the nightdress around his fingers.

  “Were you looking for Jewel?”

  Burden shook his head. “I was looking for you.”

  The fabric wound around Rugar’s thumb and forefinger, trapping them. He clenched his fists around the material and pulled it to his chest, as if it could protect him from anything Burden might say.

  “You were serving with Jewel.” It was not a question. He remembered that much of Jewel’s unit.

  “Under Shima.” The boy clutched his bad arm with his good. “Shima is dead.”

  “I pray she died as a warrior.”

  “She died telling us to retreat.” Burden’s words were clipped. There was anger behind them. “Then the poison hit her. I saw her after. It took her a long time to die.”

  Rugar untangled his fingers from the nightdress. He should stand and take control of this conversation from a lowly boy who had no powers at all, but he could not. He heard the blame and felt it was deserved. Shima had warned him she would die on this mission. She had said he was making a mistake.

  “And Jewel?”

  “Jewel led us into the palace.” The boy leaned against the door frame. He was pale from blood loss.

  “Is she dead?” Rugar asked.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “You didn’t stay with her?” Rugar stood, finding a direction for his anger, a direction away from himself.

  “I nearly died defending her.” The boy pushed away from the door frame, rising to his full height. He was standing up to the next ruler of the Fey and knew it, but that did not deter him. His anger was that great.

  Rugar recognized the emotion. He had seen it on hundreds of battlefields. “Then what happened?”

  “They captured her.”

  “Captured?” Rugar stumbled over the word. “They took prisoners?” He had heard nothing about it. It seemed a sophisticated thing for nonwarriors to do.

  “They took a prisoner. Only one.”

  The most precious one. Jewel. Rugar sat back down. The cot was hard against his buttocks. All the aches rose to the surface, along with a panic he had never felt before. “How did they know who she was?”

  “She seemed to know the man who captured her. She spoke to him in Nye and spared his life.”

  “She spared his life?” None of this was making any sense. Jewel, acting contrary to orders. Jewel, who understood better than most the necessity for rules on the battlefield. “And she allowed him to take her? You allowed him to take her?”

  “The Black Robes came into the place, and she told us to retreat. I tried to get to her, but the man hustled her away.” Burden was swaying ever so slightly. If he did not get care, he would collapse there from the lack.

  “You need to tend to yourself, son,” Rugar said, his voice tender. This boy, this Burden, had tried to save Jewel. That in itself should count for something. “I am grateful that you came to me.”

  “We need to get her back.”

  “Yes,” Rugar said. “We do.”

  Burden stared at him for a moment, then touched his good hand to his forehead and backed out of the light. His footsteps, uneven but firm, echoed as he made his way along the deck.

  Rugar gripped the edge of the bed. They had Jewel. And their poison. They could torture her. They could kill her and lie to him about her death. Somehow they had known the quickest way to defeating Rugar’s spirit.

  They had captured his heart.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Alexander leaned against the closed door. He was shaking. The girl had had an odd beauty, with those upswept brows, high cheekbones, and dark eyes. Her height had been imposing, and she had known how to use it.

  I am a soldier. I have been trained to die all my life.

  But Alexander hadn’t, and her closeness had unnerved him. The War Room seemed empty without her.

  “She’s stunning, isn’t she?” Nicholas said.

  Alexander brought his head up. His son was standing in front of the table. He was covered with blood, and his hair had fallen out of its ponytail. Yet he stood with his right foot on the bench and his right arm resting on his thigh. So casual, so comfortable, for one who had come so close to death.

  “She is our enemy.”

  Nicholas shrugged. “Better to have a magnificent enemy than one we are ashamed of.”

  Like the bunch of peasants King Constantine had defeated. The words fell unspoken between them.

  Alexander pushed away from the door. He had thought the blood and terror of the day would have cured Nicholas’s romanticism. Instead the girl seemed to add fire to it.

  He walked over to his son and put his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Flecks of blood dotted his cheek and neck. Nicholas looked up at him, and finally Alexander saw the boy hidden inside the man’s frame.

  “You could have died,” Alexander said.

  Nicholas shook his head. “I was fine.”

  “I would not have been able to bear it if you had died.”

  Nicholas smiled awkwardly at his father. “You mean the Kingdom could not bear it if I died.”

  Alexander shook his head. His hand was now covered with blood. “No,” he said softly. “I could not bear it.”

  Almost two decades ago Alexander had held Nicholas the night the boy was born. Only then Nicholas had been so tiny that Alexander’s hand covered the boy’s back and bottom. The baby had been fragile against Alexander’s shoulder, his tiny head soft and wobbly. For those first few years Alexander had gone into the boy’s room and watched him sleep, marveling at the tiny miracle he had helped create. His wife had never known of Alexander’s nocturnal roamings—she had asked him to leave her bed when she was swollen with Nicholas, and she had made it clear that he did not need to return unless something happened to the boy. His second wife had never given him children, and this overgrown child, still fragile in his flesh-and-blood shell, was all the future Alexander had.

  Alexander sighed and wiped his hand on his pants. More than anything he wanted out of that room. But not yet, not until his advisers told him all was safe. “You should have stayed here with me,” he said.

  “But, Father, they were fighting below.”

  Alexander nodded. “And dying.”

  “My place was with them.”

  “No,” Alexander said. The girl’s words still echoed in his head. Our leaders fight. “We don’t fight. I don’t know what their system is, but ours relies on you and me as thinkers, as leaders, and as figureheads. If you died, it would demoralize Blue Isle. And that would be the last thing we need.”

  Nicholas snorted. “You don’t think they would fight for their homes?”

  “We are part of their home.” Alexander patted a spot beside him. “Sit, Nicky.”

  The childhood nam
e. Nicholas looked at the place Alexander indicated, but did not move.

  “Nicholas,” Alexander said, “you are tired. Don’t let pride get in the way of allowing your body to rest.”

  Nicholas smiled—a small, fleeting grin of acknowledgment—and then sat beside his father.

  The blood had stained Nicholas’s skin. The boy was slender and more muscled than Alexander had ever been. The sword practice with Stephen had given him strength.

  Alexander sighed. He had to get through to Nicholas, because if he did not, he might lose the only thing he truly valued. “I know,” he said, “that you need to be different from me. I am more of a scholar. I prefer talks with Matthias to exercise. I prefer examining Kingdom reports over riding a horse. What you don’t see yet, Nicky, is that you are different. You are stronger and smarter, and you have your own concerns. If you would just finish the last bit of your education, I would be able to use you as an adviser.”

  “I don’t see why books are important—” Nicholas started, but Alexander raised his hand for silence.

  “I need you now, Nicky,” Alexander said. “I need you to understand what it means to be King and to stand by my side. We know little about these creatures that have invaded us, and what we do know could be wrong. Even touching that girl could have got you killed. Just breathing the same air—”

  “She wouldn’t hurt me.”

  This time Nicholas’s words stopped Alexander. He ran a hand through his hair. He, too, had seen the girl’s odd attractiveness but knew it for what it was—a temptation. Nicholas was young and at the age when anything female attracted his attention. Alexander almost said so, then didn’t. He had to keep his son on his side.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  Nicholas flushed. He looked down at his hands. Alexander looked too. They were nicked and bloodstained. A long cut still oozed on the back of his left palm.

  “I say that because she had me,” Nicholas said.

  Alexander grabbed Nicholas’s hand and pulled it away from the scab. “What do you mean, ‘had you’?”

  Nicholas stared at their joined hands until Alexander let go. “I was fighting on the steps leading out of the kitchen.

  “I had found a place on the first landing that protected my back and gave me a good brace, as Stephen had told me to do, but I must have moved, because the next thing I knew, someone hit me, and I toppled down the stairs.”

  Alexander resisted the urge to close his eyes. He kept his breathing even. Nicholas’s story was not reassuring him. The more he heard, the more he wanted his son out of the fighting.

  “I landed next to this dead body”—Nicholas shuddered—“and when I looked up, she was there, with a sword at my throat.”

  One quick movement this afternoon and his son would have been dead.

  “She didn’t kill me, Dad. She didn’t even try. It was almost as if she knew me.”

  Alexander’s body was covered with a fine layer of sweat that hadn’t been there a moment before. He gripped his knees to keep his hands from shaking. “She probably knew who you were.”

  “No,” Nicholas said. “She was surprised when the staff volunteered to protect me.”

  By the Holy One. Alexander felt the sweat roll down his back. The boy tossed off details as if he were talking about a riding trip outside the city.

  “She even asked me who I was. I wouldn’t tell her. But she knew me, Dad. And even though her people wanted to kill me, she wouldn’t let them.”

  “Then you got the upper hand?”

  “There was an opening,” Nicholas said. “I took advantage of it.”

  His son must have felt Alexander’s nervousness, because he was no longer elaborating. Alexander didn’t want him to. Nicholas was safe. That was all that mattered. That, and the fact that Nicholas would never get into the same situation again.

  “You have no idea,” Alexander said slowly, “what she might have done to you. She might have been enchanting you. Maybe they wanted someone to infiltrate us. Maybe this is part of a plan.”

  Nicholas shook his head. “She seemed surprised when she realized she was captured.”

  Alexander sighed. They would argue about this forever. “No matter what you think of the girl, you need to be at my side from now on. Think, son. What would have happened if you had died at her feet? How would those servants have felt? Would they have kept fighting?”

  Nicholas’s flush grew deeper. He knew the answer as well as Alexander did.

  “I know you have wanted something to test you your entire life.” Alexander put his hand on the boy’s naked back, surprised at the clamminess of Nicholas’s skin. Nicholas, despite his bravado, had been under a great strain. Alexander softened his tone. “Well, you had that test, and you met it with courage that hasn’t been seen since your great-great-grandfather. Our people will discuss your exploits for years. That’s all we needed. They know now that we will sacrifice everything for Blue Isle.”

  Alexander took off his own shirt and put it around Nicholas. “But we can’t sacrifice everything, because if we do, we lose the only strengths we have. Do you think it was easy for me to hear that girl’s taunts? I would like to be fighting out there too.” He stood, unable to sit still with what he was saying. “Even through these walls I can hear the sounds of the dying. And I would like to be out there, saving just one life—”

  “Yes, Dad, that’s it,” Nicholas said, clutching the shirt around him.

  “—but I forget that by the correct actions in here, I can save more than one life. I can save hundreds of lives. I can save Blue Isle.” Alexander put his hands behind his back, considering his words before saying them. “Nicky, we are lucky to have the holy water. Lucky to be able to drive the Fey away. Lucky that girl was so frightened of the Danites that she came with you. Nye fought for years and lost an entire generation of young men against the Fey. Did you know that? And now the Fey own the country. You heard her. She said, ‘You would not have given it all to us,’ and she is right. We would not have. We are still a people, still a country. We still make our own choices. You heard her, Nicky. She speaks fluent Nye, but Nye is a dead language because the country it represents is now part of the Fey’s Empire. We are small, but we are sovereign, and I mean to stay that way.”

  Nicholas slipped his arms through the shirt. He was cringing just a little, as if the strain of the day was finally getting to him. “How do you plan to do that, Father?”

  Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know. The Fey have practiced warfare since the Roca was Absorbed. We have never fought. We have only traded. It is as if the Roca had given us the holy water all those generations ago to protect us from this very threat.”

  “Faith, Father?” Nicholas said. “You were never religious before.”

  “Then how do you explain it?” Alexander said. “The Fey came here with a strong fighting force, enough warriors to take over the city before night fell. We have no experience, no real knowledge of what to do, and yet we have held them off. Call it luck, call it fate, or call it God’s will, but we have survived. And I mean to continue.”

  Nicholas leaned back. His face was drawn with exhaustion, the shadows under his eyes so deep that his eyes looked sunken.

  “I need your help, Nicky,” Alexander said. “We need to make these decisions together. We need to learn together. Because they will come after us. The Fey are smart. They know the value of leadership, and they will destroy what they can.”

  “But you said we won this time.”

  “The battle,” Alexander said. “We won’t have won the war until the invasion force is dead.”

  “Or sent packing back to Nye.”

  “No,” Alexander said. “If they go to Nye, they will try again. We have to prevent them from leaving here if it is the last thing we do.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jewel held a torch in her left hand. Her wrists still burned from the pressure of the ropes. She leaned against the exit, the stairs behind her, her
breath coming in quick gasps.

  For the moment she was safe. The enclosed landing provided a measure of security that would disappear in a matter of seconds. The King’s people had to have heard the screaming. It still echoed in her ears. She had glanced over her shoulder only once, hoping Silence was behind her, but he wasn’t. It was a vain hope anyway. According to his training, her life was the important one.

  She had to get out of the palace alive. Then she had to make it back to the Shadowlands. Silence had managed to tell her while Stephen was getting a torch that the Fey should meet in Shadowlands.

  Those were the last words the two of them had spoken to each other.

  She pushed the door open and peered through the crack. The hallway was littered with bodies. Fey bodies, hideously deformed. She looked away. She had come so close to dying this day. Only the Prince had saved her with his quick movement. Otherwise she, too, would be lying disfigured on an Islander floor.

  If they saw her, they would kill her.

  The hallway was dark except for the thin light of a single torch stuck into the wall. She could see no one except the bodies. Broken furniture was scattered around them, and the floor was wet. She hoped the magic woven into her boots to protect them from rain would protect them from this false water as well.

  She pushed the door open the rest of the way. The stench of rotting flesh made her want to gag. She bit her lower lip and stepped out, into the wetness. The water beaded on her boots, and she let out a small sigh. Then she crouched beside the bodies, avoiding their twisted faces, looking for their weapons.

  The weapons had been taken.

  The Islanders weren’t completely ignorant about war.

  She didn’t recognize this hallway. Silence and Stephen had been taking her to the dungeons when Silence had slit her ropes, shoved the torch into her hand, and told her to run.

  And she had, the Powers forgive her. She hadn’t even waited to see if Silence got his advantage. She knew the drill: a Doppelgänger was supposed to defend the Black King’s family with his life. But that didn’t make it easy the first time. She had never needed a real defense before.