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

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “But he didn’t give his word, did he?” Stephen smiled. The smile looked odd on his face. “He merely made an unsubstantiated promise.”

  Alexander opened his mouth to give his word, and in that moment Nicholas stomped on Stephen’s foot. The older man grimaced and Nicholas grabbed his arm, pulling the knife away from his throat. Alexander reached behind himself and grabbed the water pitcher, flinging the contents at Stephen. Lord Fesler needed only the suggestion: he tossed the holy water at Stephen. Alexander’s water hit Nicholas and splashed on Stephen, but Fesler’s holy water hit Stephen on his left side.

  Nicholas pushed away from Stephen and scrambled across the room, hand at his throat. Stephen’s clothes peeled off his skin. A haze filled the room, followed by the stench of burning flesh. Stephen screamed. The lords looked on in horror. Nicholas stood beside his father and grabbed his arm. Alexander leaned into him, relieved at his son’s strength. Relieved that his son was still his son.

  Stephen slipped onto the floor, his legs jelling into a single mass. He tried to push the water off his skin, but his hands were melting, the skin dripping off like blood. He cried out again before collapsing on the floor.

  Alexander could no longer see him, but he heard thuds that stopped after a few short moments. The haze and stench grew. Alexander had to swallow hard to keep the meager contents of his stomach from rising.

  Finally all sounds stopped. He patted Nicholas’s hand, then took it off his arm and made his way around the room. The body was unrecognizable. Only the eyes remained, open and staring at nothing. The stench was so strong that Alexander felt as if it had got inside him.

  Alexander stood over the body. His trembling had increased. One mistake and he would have died. If he had been a bit less cautious, if he had ever allowed himself to be alone with Stephen, Stephen would have murdered him. Alexander’s eyes were watering from the smell. He wished now that he had approached it all differently. He wished he had tested his advisers from the beginning.

  “By the Bloody Sword,” Lord Stowe said. He was now standing behind Alexander. Nicholas approached too but said nothing. Lord Fesler was pale, and Lord Egan still sat at the table, his hand over his mouth. Monte had moved closer to the body, still holding his knife.

  “You hit him with the holy water,” Nicholas said to Lord Fesler.

  Fesler nodded.

  “We’ll need to test anyone who comes near the King with holy water from now on,” Nicholas said.

  “We tried that already,” Lord Stowe said.

  “How did we miss Stephen?” Monte asked. “He’s with the King all the time.”

  “At first,” Alexander said, not looking at any of them but still staring at the body, “he avoided the tests. Always some excuse. I never really noticed. But one afternoon he took a vial and poured it onto his hand.”

  “He couldn’t have.”

  “Not unless he planted it himself,” Nicholas said.

  “He probably replaced the water with regular water,” Monte said.

  “Then why didn’t he do that up here?” Fesler asked.

  “No one gets into this room without me,” said Alexander. He was shaking so hard, he had to sit down. He took the closest chair, the one Nicholas had been using.

  “I don’t understand,” Lord Stowe said. “He looked like Stephen, but he disintegrated like a Fey. Is this what happens when you’re possessed?”

  “If it was that easy,” Nicholas said, “then why haven’t we seen others like this?”

  “Maybe we have,” Lord Fesler said, “and didn’t know it.”

  “He looked like Stephen,” Alexander said. “He acted like Stephen. He remembered things only Stephen would know. He had to be Stephen, changed somehow. That woman transformed him in the corridor.”

  “Or before”,” Nicholas said.

  Alexander shook his head. “Before, he was speaking against the Fey. After, the things he said could have been taken for concern if we had only paid attention.”

  “But you knew,” Lord Egan said. “How did you know?”

  “I knew there was a leak,” Alexander said. “I tested all of you. It wasn’t until Stephen that I had a direct link. Stephen gave himself away. But I never expected this. Ever. I had thought, when I threw that water, to startle him. To test him. I had never expected to scare him.”

  “They could be everywhere,” Lord Fesler said, his voice soft. “We would never know. They could be in this room, and we would never know.”

  Alexander put a hand to his forehead. The thought had occurred to him. The Rocaan’s task would be doubly difficult. Not just holy water for war, but for tests as well. Daily tests—and how far would they go? Each servant? Each person who came near the nobility? What about the people on the streets? What about the children? Where did the distrust end?

  “How many of them are there?” Egan asked.

  Alexander sighed. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “But they just won this battle.” He backed away from the body and turned to the curious faces around him. “Not only do they have our people and our holy water, now they have our confidence as well. We will never completely trust each other again.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Jewel pressed her hand against her forehead, as if she could push the headache out the back of her skull. She had been awake almost thirty hours, and she could feel the tension in her back with each movement of her shoulders. The buckets of water were heavy. She wished the Domestics had assigned her another task.

  She pushed open the double doors that led into the Domicile with her backside, letting the rust-iron stench of blood overwhelm her. The Domicile was the largest building in Shadowlands. Rugar had decreed it the most important, since he figured it would have to act as hospital as well as the foundation for most of the interior work done on the Shadowlands. The building was long and narrow, divided into sections. Rooms for chefs, rooms for weavers, and a private room for the Shaman. Some of the rooms were small. The main room, the one she had walked into, was the size of three rooms, and currently the hospital.

  Seven Infantry filled the beds with sword wounds to the gut. Another had a slash along his arm, and one body rested on the cot near the door, waiting for someone to take it for ritual cleansing and disbursal. Jewel set the water down near the cot and stretched. Her back cracked and popped as she straightened it. She had never sat out a battle before, and the smells, leaching through the walls of Shadowlands, had terrified her more than the glimpse of darkness when the first Fey had come through the Circle Door.

  The prisoners, though. The prisoners intrigued her. And she was not allowed to see them until her father and Caseo had spent time with them.

  Neri approached Jewel, face drawn and white with exhaustion. Since the move to Shadowlands, the Domestics hadn’t had much rest. The strains of a battle so nearby had drained them even further. Neri bent and picked up one of the buckets.

  “Thanks, Jewel,” she said. Her smile was as tired as her eyes. “We’ve done all we can for the moment, I think.”

  Jewel nodded toward the beds. “Will they be all right?”

  Neri shrugged. “With Infantry it’s hard to tell. We do what we can, but most of them lack the magick necessary to heal themselves.” Then her eyes widened just a little. “No insult intended,” she said.

  “None taken.” Most of the Fey did not know, even yet, of Jewel’s Visions. In fact, many believed that her capture during the First Battle for Jahn had been because she had no magick power of her own.

  Seven more wounded, perhaps seven more dead. And no reinforcements. The Fey would become servants of the Islanders through attrition if this continued. Just by the sheer numbers. Eventually, there would be no Fey left to go to battle.

  Her father’s revelation that the Black King would not help them had shaken her to the core. It made the entire situation different. They were as helpless as the Hevish when the Fey had surrounded them on all sides, cut off access to the roads and rivers, and interrupted their trade. T
he Hevish were a small but determined people, and they had fought a pitched battle from their fortified country for five years. But time worked against them. Slaughter of the young, then of the older generation, as well as starvation, had defeated them.

  A trapped people could not withstand a siege. Especially when the enemy had all its resources at its command.

  Unless the Warders found the secret to the poison, the Fey had to find another way out of the situation. If only they had brought more Doppelgängers. One could be assigned to take on the person of a sailor the Islanders had hidden, and navigate a ship out of the treacherous bay. But Rugar had used the Doppelgängers traditionally, in battle and out, to gain information about the enemy. Now three were dead, and the two he had sent into the Tabernacle would probably die as well.

  She stepped off the porch into the swirling mist. Over the past year she had grown accustomed to losing her feet in the murky edges of Shadowlands. She no longer blinked to clear the misty grayness from her eyes. The world looked right with blurred edges. She was afraid that if she stepped back into the real world, its brightness would blind her.

  Her father was probably back in the cabin by now. She walked quickly past the buildings still under construction, past the arguing craftsmen. The pounding was something else she had got used to. She paused in front of the Warders’ cabin. Smoke plumed out of the chimney. In the early days of Shadowlands, the Fey had not allowed fires. This was before they had learned that the walls were somehow porous, and that the air in Shadowlands remained as clear as the air outside it.

  Still, the fire intrigued her because the temperature was comfortable. Her father had seen to that. They were doing something. A shiver ran down her back. Something with the prisoners? She hoped not. She wanted to see them before the Warders began their experiments.

  But she was supposed to see her father first. She walked past the Warders’ cabin to her own. The cabin her father had built for them had been the meeting place at first, and that was his excuse for its size. But he had made it the meeting place so that he wouldn’t have to justify a larger cabin to the others. He had said that people would envy them if they thought the cabin had been built for privilege, but would understand if it existed for utility.

  Sometimes she felt his justifications were silly ways to avoid confrontation over rank that should have been inevitable in their position.

  If she didn’t return to Nye, her grandfather would make one of her brothers Black King. He had already thought of that possibility. It was the reason he never let more than two members of the same family fight in the same battle. He protected his heirs. And he had precedent. His own father had picked a second son to succeed him when it appeared that the first son had died in a raid. Fortunately for Rugad, his brother had returned almost a decade after the father’s death. The claim did not hold.

  She wished she had known more about her grandfather’s opposition before she’d left. She wished she had listened more closely to the arguments she had overheard, instead of concentrating on the oddity of her first Vision.

  But she had had a Vision about Nicholas, the King’s son. She had been meant to come to Blue Isle.

  Or had it been a warning?

  She would never know.

  Finally she reached her own cabin. Just outside, she stopped. Two guards stood at the door. Burden was one, a scowl across his slender face. He must have tangled with her father again. The other, Amar, stood with his legs apart and arms crossed. His muscles bulged. She had always liked Amar, even though he was of her father’s generation and had never shown any sign of magickal ability. He had been a solid Infantryman and a loyal guard to her entire family.

  She nodded at them as she approached. “Is my father all right?”

  “He is taking matters into his own hands again,” Burden said.

  Burden’s attitude grated on her father. It was beginning to bother her as well. “How unusual,” she said, “for the leader of this party, and the Black King’s son.”

  Burden flushed. Amar tried to hide a smile. Jewel noted it, feeling her own eyes sparkle, but she didn’t let the mirth move to the rest of her face. She passed them both and went inside.

  The room seemed small and dark without a fire. Her father sat on the table, one foot on a chair, the other dangling. Only his eyes moved when she came in, tracking her progress from the door to his side.

  “You were supposed to be here,” he said.

  “I couldn’t just sit.”

  “You were supposed to sit and think.”

  She shrugged, unwilling to fight. “Sitting and thinking doesn’t work for me, although I did come up with a few things.”

  “Save them.” He pushed the chair away and jumped off the table. “I have some prisoners for you to meet.”

  Her heartbeat accelerated, and she caught her breath. He hadn’t wanted her to see them until the Warders were done. “Why did you bring them here?”

  “Because Caseo explained his experiments, and I decided he could waste the poison before he destroyed possibly valuable lives.” Her father’s tone was flat, but Jewel heard the anger underneath.

  “You said the prisoners were his.”

  “And they will be,” Rugar said. “When I am done with them.”

  “Have you already questioned them?”

  “I have, and so have a few others. They’re not answering anything.”

  “And so you want me to try? I have no experience with this.”

  “You have more experience with Islanders than most of us here. You’re one of the few who has had a prolonged discussion with them.”

  Jewel’s mouth had gone dry. She had, but the context had been different. “What about Solanda?”

  “She’s not back yet. And we have no Doppelgängers here.”

  “I haven’t been among the Islanders in a year. Surely Burden or some of the others—”

  “They know how to kill the Islanders. If I need help with that, I have an entire campful who will have creative suggestions.” Her father’s flat tone was gone. His frustration was clear. She was finally understanding what he faced.

  The military crew sometimes forgot that the enemy was more than a fighting force, more than creatures to be bested or killed. Since Rugar had isolated the Fey, he had never bothered to get to know the enemy. So Rugar was going to have to rely on Jewel’s very meager experience.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  “The extra room,” he said. “I wanted to talk with you alone first.”

  She nodded. The prisoners couldn’t really escape anyway. The guards were more for show. They would be trapped in the Shadowlands, unable to get out. But if they got their hands on the poison, they would be able to do a lot of damage.

  She went down the hall, tucking the loose strands of hair into her braid and tugging on her leather vest. Her exhaustion had lifted at the thought of seeing the prisoners. She half hoped Nicholas would be among them. She had wanted to see him again, to talk with him, so that she could better understand what had happened between them that day. By all rights they should have slaughtered each other. Instead they had toyed with each other as if they were childhood sweethearts.

  Her cheeks flushed at the memory. No man, not even her dear friend Burden, had brought such an instant response. She knew what her grandfather would say if she was to tell him of the event. Go with the magick, girl. It was his phrase and, he said, the secret to his long life as Black King.

  Go with the magick.

  She flung open the door. All three prisoners were sitting. Their wrists and ankles were bound, and another rope bound them to chairs. The ropes looked loose, so the Warders must have placed an additional binding on the three. They were looking down, but none of them had that magnificent blond hair she remembered of Nicholas.

  “It is rude to snub someone who has just entered a room,” she said in Nye. Her Islander was still poor, even though she now had some of the basics.

  The man farthest to her left raised his he
ad. He wasn’t as old as her father, but he wasn’t young either. His long face had crow’s-feet near the eyes, and a sensitive mouth. The squareness of his features startled her. Islanders were like Fey made without whimsy. “It is also rude to tie your guests to their chairs.”

  She smiled. Perhaps all Islander men were verbally aggressive. “Point taken,” she said. “But you are not a guest.”

  The center man bit his lower lip and stared at her. He was little more than a boy, with a boy’s leanness and lack of grace. His pale skin had acne scars, and his eyes, deep and blue, were wide with fear.

  “I couldn’t have got here on my own,” the first man said. “Your friends brought me. Where I come from, that makes me a guest.”

  Jewel nodded. “Where I come from, that makes you a prisoner.”

  “Wh-what plan you to do us?” the boy asked. The boy’s Nye was poor. He had clearly never been off the Isle.

  The third man shushed him. As he turned to the boy, the third man’s profile revealed a hawkish nose and thin lips.

  “I’ll give the orders here,” Jewel said.

  The third man glanced at her as if seeing her for the first time. He was older than the others, his eyes as narrow as the rest of him. He didn’t like her. She could feel the hatred come off him in waves.

  “That’s because you ain’t tied up, bitch,” he said. His Nye seemed as poor as the boy’s, but it was clearly an affectation. He had a stronger mastery of the colloquialisms than any other Islander she had heard of.

  “Oh,” she said, keeping her tone light, “I suspect I would give the orders whether I was tied up or not. In Shadowlands the Fey dominate.”

  “But not on the Isle,” the third man said.

  “Not yet,” she said agreeably, and closed the door.

  The third man said something to the others in Islander. She caught the words “alone” and “us” combined with what she believed was another curse specifically designed for women.

  “You will speak Nye or you will never speak again,” she said.

  The color fled from the boy’s face. “Sorry, missus,” he said, “but Nye—a—no is—for me.”