House of Bastiion (The Haidren Legacy, Book 1)

by K. L. Kolarich

  “My father accomplished what no other could. He secured Orynthia’s peace. Yet here we sit, at the start of an age that ought to be defined by renewed vitality…among my nameless brothers and sisters, who will never see it.”

  Luscia’s forehead furrowed as she followed his line of sight to the carved figures.

  “My mother became skilled at hiding her pregnancies while I grew up. The court couldn’t be allowed to see a pattern, lest the Peerage lose faith in our line. The youngest of my siblings would’ve turned five this summer, had he or she lived to their birth.”

  “Dmitri, I—” Luscia knew loss intimately, but struggled to form an adequate response to his pain. “My brother, Phalen, is everything to me—everything left of my mother. I cannot imagine the agony of losing him. But…” She paused, genuinely baffled. “I still don’t understand. Why entrust me with this secret?”

  “Because Accords are capricious things, Lady Boreal. Since my Ascension, I’ve made a practice of studying our own. Not just what was written long ago, but the things unwritten…things not written at all. Our forefathers, yours and mine, they concealed a loophole for the outer territories. You see, the Accords between Orynthia and the Houses are not tied to the realm, or even to Bastiion. They are tied to my line, to the descendants of Thoarne himself.

  “My closest cousins are so far removed from the original line, chaos would ensue if they were to fight over the regency. Now self-sustained, the Houses would pull away to solidify their independence. Broken into factions, our insecure borders would lure neighboring kingdoms to action. Prudently, our allies to the east would invade Pilar before Darakai could assume it.” Dmitri’s disheveled hair brushed his cheeks as he shook his head. “The realm as we know it would collapse entirely.”

  “So, you produce an heir of your own,” Luscia concluded aloud, familiar with the burden of carrying on one’s lineage. “With an heir secured, those dangers are easily circumvented.”

  “That is the logical solution, yes. The Peerage favor Bahira’Rasha, heir apparent to the Queendom of Razôuel. They believe a union with the Zôueli princess would yield the strongest heir in a century. It’s why we’ve formally invited Bahira’Rasha and the Zôueli queen to join us during the solstice.”

  Luscia searched his eyes and the foreboding sadness hidden within. “Then there is no need for distress. Your heir will follow in your footsteps, as you will after your father.”

  The prince looked wistful. “That is such a wonderful dream. A favorite, when sleep permits it.”

  “Your Highness, I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  Dmitri fiddled within his pocket, pulling out his elixir, and peered into the empty vial. Then, looking up, he smiled at her. Uncertain, her smile in return faltered.

  “I’m dying, Luscia.”

  Slowly, Luscia’s eyes abandoned Dmitri’s and dropped to his chest. Rustling leaves, the company of evening crickets, it all faded as her gifted ears sought only the sound of his inhale and exhale. In, then out; a smooth, uninterrupted rhythm. Back and forth, like a rocking cradle, cocooning her mind as it spun. Luscia felt her head shake.

  “Niit,” she heard herself say, having gone numb. “No, no. There are tonics. Boreal has a remedy for everything—”

  “I’m dying, Luscia,” he repeated. “It’s all right. Luscia, look at me.” Dmitri reached over and squeezed her fingers. “It is—it’s all right. I’ve known for a few years. Alora has known even longer, I assume.”

  “Alora…?”

  “She saved me. When I was a boy, maybe six or seven, I became very ill. Dangerously so. When the court physicians failed to find a solution, Alora came. I’m told she spent days, even nights at my bedside. When I finally woke, my parents were told my ailment had been cured. To this day, they still believe it was.

  “Alora concocted a multitude of therapies throughout my youth. This elixir sustains me, but the dosage increases as I grow older. I feel…I feel myself dying, a little more each day. I don’t know exactly what these contain,” Dmitri set the empty vial on the bench between them, “and I don’t need to know. But Alora’s predictions proved more than accurate—your mixture offers me more longevity, like a spike with a slow taper. However, it too is only temporary.”

  “Niit, we will keep trying,” Luscia protested, a new kind of defiance rising in her chest. “There is an answer, a different substance or ratio—”

  “We’ve accepted there is no cure. I will die, Luscia. Perhaps not this year, or the next, but the night approaches when I won’t be able to wake up.”

  A single bead of moisture trailed down her cheek and splashed her knuckles. Against logic or reason, Luscia suddenly felt very alone.

  “Tell me what to do,” she pleaded. “Tell me what you need.”

  “I need time,” he said gently. “I need you to continue giving me that, just long enough to produce an heir to the Orynthian throne.”

  “Who else knows of this? Suspects it?” Luscia cataloged the obstacles in keeping such a secret.

  “After tonight, Alora and yourself. My mother can’t bear the burden of knowing the truth, and my father won’t hear of it.” He rubbed his forehead. “The Peerage cannot be allowed to sense a weakness in the line. At best, each noble would use it to his own advantage. We need the Peerage behind the regency to protect my heir during the rest of my father’s reign, and to uphold the Accords once the child takes the throne.”

  “What will you tell the Quadren?”

  “Nothing. Ira will inherit chairmanship of the Peerage after his father. It’s typical for the Haidren to Bastiion to hold the majority seat. Sayuri…well, it’s better Pilar believes the facade than learn the reality. Pilar would exploit Bastiion’s weakness, rather adeptly I fear.”

  “And Darakai?”

  Dmitri diverted his gaze and straightened his shoulders.

  “Zaethan will not learn of my condition. I have my reasons for that.” A sudden tension pinched the prince’s neck. “Reasons which are not eligible for discussion.”

  Luscia slid her hand across the bench to console him, then remembered her place.

  “I’m sorry, Dmitri, for what it’s worth. I am so very sorry.”

  “Tadöm,” he whispered in her native tongue.

  They sat in the quietness of the garden together, each lost in their own thoughts. Dmitri stared at the bird he’d carved, perched in the dirt.

  “I know I’ve become a disappointment to you these past weeks,” he said at last. “Since your arrival, really. I hope you understand now.” Rotating toward her, Dmitri’s face fell in defeat. “There can be no hint of favoritism. I cannot overturn jurisdiction for Boreal, however much I wish to. You have to know that I would tear apart this entire city to avenge those children. But I must support the Accords—they alone hold the realm together after tragedy, when tensions rise. The Accords must endure after I’m gone. For the sake of my child—Thoarne’s child—they must.”

  “Then, se’lah Aurynth.” Luscia released a breath of apprehension, her decision made. “I am at your complete service. I’m with you, Dmitri Thoarne. Until Aurynth.”

  “No.” The tired prince scooped her fingers off the stone and into his own. He brought the inside of her palm to his lips for the gentlest of touches, then pressed it against the uneven beat of his heart. “The fate of Orynthia, my very life, rests in your hands. Luscia, it is I who am with you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Zaethan

  It had been ages since Zaethan studied anything. He hated parchment. The smell of it. The feel of it. Yet here he sat, in an office he never used, scrutinizing every map of the Proper he owned for the third consecutive hour.

  He chewed on a stalk of camilla root, what was left of it, as he examined the intersecting web of streets. There was no pattern to the cross-caste murders, apart from the youth and lineage of each victim, each having been robbed
of their Ascension. Zaethan grimaced, charting a path between the various marks he’d scribbled onto the parchment. From one bloodred dot to another, he surveyed the crimson lines between. With most alleyways unrepresented on palace maps, it was impossible to determine how the killer moved about unobserved.

  A triplet of beats knocked at the door. Zaethan considered ordering the sentry away, as he hadn’t made much progress, but neither was he about to anytime soon.

  “Uni!”

  The door cracked open and a head of sable ringlets popped through. Long fingers brushed the shelf of hair away from a boyish face to reveal a bright, crooked grin.

  “Owàamo, Alpha Zà,” the warrior tested. “You call, I come report, yeah?”

  “Uni, Jabari. I called for your report,” Zaethan reiterated, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  He’d admitted Jabari Muthwali into his personal pryde six months ago, but still found it difficult to communicate with their new addition. Bred in the mountains and raised in Yowekao, Jabari’s Andwele was fragmented, his Unitarian worse. Any attempt to combine the two resulted in kakk soup.

  A crash and roar of masculine laughter came from behind Jabari, where the offices connected to a common area in the guard house. The screech of moving furniture and more voices joined the ruckus.

  “Jabari, what the Depths is that noise?”

  “Eh….” The trim Darakaian turned to investigate. “That be the Jwona rapiki, Alpha Zà.”

  Zaethan bit down on the camilla root until it snapped.

  “Are we all calling him that now?” he growled. At Jabari’s look of confusion, Zaethan rolled up the maps and motioned briskly. “Just get in here.”

  The youngest member of his pryde bobbed on his heels in the doorway before slipping inside. “Uni, Alpha Zà.”

  If the freshly Ascended warrior wasn’t such a natural talent, Zaethan didn’t know how his patience with Jabari would have fared. His thumb tapped a stout glass of water, wishing it were full of something brash and bitter instead.

  “You may begin, Jabari, and do make it brief for once.” Zaethan pointed to the space in front of his desk.

  “Eh, uni. No trouble come two-night pass for prince, ano. Easy like breeze, but for dark and light al’Haidren come a call. Dark al’Haidren prince send away, say ‘not feel well, tell her go.’” Jabari’s cheerful grin returned, having also developed a dislike for Sayuri Naborū-Zuo during his stint in Bastiion. “Then, prince send small gangle boy to fetch y’siti al’Haidren. She come like moth after midnight, in sleep dress. He spend all night with y’siti in the garden, yeah—”

  “Wait. Doru, stop.” Zaethan’s hand cut off Jabari’s jumbled explanation. “What do you mean, ‘in sleep dress’?”

  Jabari danced in place as his hands mimed around his chest and middle.

  “Erm…tie-dress. For night-night walkabout.”

  “Jabari, are you telling me the al’Haidren to Boreal—the y’siti—was brought to the prince in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her dressing gown?”

  The warrior clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “Uni, yeah!”

  Zaethan spit the pulverized root out the side of his mouth and shot out of the chair. “And how did our prince seem when she left?”

  “Eh.” Jabari wiggled a brow, chuckling to himself. “Little happy, not big happy, ano.”

  Another bang emitted through a wall shared with the common area. Zaethan’s hand clutched the back of his neck and clenched when a second followed.

  “Jabari, how often does the prince send for the y’siti?”

  Before he could answer, the office door creaked open again to allow a boulder of muscle through.

  “Ahoté,” Kumo interrupted. “You want to step out here.”

  The beta locked eyes with Zaethan and latched the door in retreat.

  “We aren’t done,” Zaethan told the younger warrior. “You will tell me how many times this occurred and how often it happens in the future. Do you understand me, Jabari? Yeye qondai?”

  “Uni zà, Alpha Zà, meme qondai.” He bumped a fist against his chest and stepped back, allowing Zaethan to lead the way into the main room of the guard house.

  His beta waited rigidly outside the door. Zaethan’s cheeks went hot as Kumo sucked his teeth and jutted a bristled jaw toward a crowd of sentries in the center of the guard house. A ragtag collection of chairs had been dragged around a table, and over the heads of the sentries, dice flew in the air, eliciting a raucous cheer at their return to the wood.

  Half the men should have been at their posts. Zaethan recognized more than enough faces to confirm it.

  “Owàamo.”

  A cluster of sentries parted at Zaethan’s greeting, though he spoke primarily for the Darakaian audience. Across the division sat the author of the commotion. Glass of bwoloa in hand, Wekesa had a cross-caste laundress perched in his lap and a single muddied boot propped on the table, soaking a soiled ring into the wood surface. Zaethan knew the other alpha hadn’t chosen his guard house for a random game of dice.

  Ano. He’d come to piss in it.

  “Zaeth, won’t you join us?” the bastard shouted in mock camaraderie as he lowered the shallow glass of liquor. Wekesa rolled the pair of dice between bruised knuckles and let his free hand roam the woman’s bare shoulder. “So much sweeter, a mix, uni? But our commander’s son already knows this—don’t you, Alpha Zà?”

  Wekesa twisted his neck as if to admire the woman’s teak skin, but slid his coal-black eyes toward Zaethan and smirked. The angle invited sunlight to bathe the ragged scar along the side of his skull. Zaethan anchored onto the rapidly fading reminder of his rival’s defeat.

  “Get out of my guard house,” Zaethan barked at the laundress, hunkering down over the tabletop when she hesitated. “I said, get out!”

  “A bit hypocritical, yeah?”

  Murmurs and smothered snickers rumbled through the grouping at Wekesa’s insinuation.

  “Your pryde is on duty, Wekesa,” Zaethan said coldly. “Yet they are here, in my guard house.”

  “They’ve earned a break.” His tongue probed the side of his fat mouth before he turned to spit on the floor. “After all, it’s a very involved investigation, yeye qondai? My pryde could be here for months doing what yours could not.”

  Kumo came up behind Zaethan, popping his knuckles—a series of bursts Zaethan knew too well. He bit back a volatile swell of curses at Wekesa’s brazen disrespect and instead straightened his spine, plastering a grin on his face.

  “You’re a fairly gifted man, Wekesa.”

  “High praise from our Alpha Zà. Zullee, accepted with honor,” he sneered, translating for the Unitarian sentries.

  “Which is why I just can’t understand,” Zaethan folded his arms and paced through the gathering as the sentries shifted out of his way, “how a gifted man like Wekesa keeps overlooking one fundamental principle.”

  “Uni, go ahead. Share with us, Zaeth.” Wekesa freed the dice and laced his fingers in his lap, lowering his voice when Zaethan halted near his shoulder. “Speak, while they still listen.”

  “The Jwona rapiki is free to waste his own time in Bastiion, like a weak, sniveling yancy.” Zaethan bent until his chin hovered inches above Wekesa’s scar. “But he keeps forgetting he’s not free to waste my time. Each member of his pryde is mine. Their time is mine. So, since the Fate writer is free to do as he pleases, his warriors will not rest until he assumes each of their posts and personally relieves them. And for every instance of the Jwona rapiki’s disobedience, I will transfer one of his men to join our forces at the border of Hagarh.”

  Undertones of humor evaporated from the lake of faces. For the mingling of Darakaians and Unitarians, both sentry and pryde, this moment was critical. Zaethan was Alpha Zà, and he needed to hold his ground in the only manner he had left—targeting those und
er his own influence to punish the one currently outside it.

  “Ho’waladim.” Zaethan reached over Wekesa for the other alpha’s nearly empty glass and downed the remaining fluid. Slowly, he replaced it in front of him. “As is due you.”

  Turning, Zaethan nodded to Kumo as he exited the building, aiming straight for his apartments.

  “I would have punched him for that,” Kumo said, hurrying after him. “But you know, kàchà kocho. Whatever works for you, Ahoté.”

  “Instruct Zahra to follow Wekesa. Unseen. And put Jabari back on Dmitri’s guard tonight, he’s on assignment for me,” Zaethan rattled off as they neared the gate. “Meet me after dark. Bring Takoda.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’m tired of these games. My father’s guest is wearing out his welcome.” Zaethan squinted in the growing heat and levelled with his beta. “We need to use his own tactics against him.”

  Four nights, Àla’maia watched them stalk the streets of Marketown. Four nights enveloped in cloud, she refused to light their way and bled her tears for their misfortune.

  On the fifth, the moon turned radiantly optimistic, casting her brilliance over the assembly of trading stalls. Unabashed, Àla’maia shone her confidence in Zaethan’s pursuit.

  “Owàa’s lover is with us tonight, Alpha Zà! Finally, she blesses our quest!” Takoda hailed over a shoulder, shifting his head of braids to the side to avoid a low-hanging clothesline.

  “Uni, that she is,” Zaethan concurred, surveying the rising silhouette of buildings on either side of the bustling alley. A few blocks back, a hag had insisted she saw movement up there the night prior, though she’d been peddling pipe marrow at the time—and of ill quality, by the look of her current stock. If the Pilarese trader two tents down hadn’t confirmed the sightings of a cloaked figure sweeping the rooftops throughout the ghetto, Zaethan might have given up on his hunch that the killer wasn’t traveling at street-level. Marketown and the Drifting Bazaar were the most heavily trafficked areas the killer had charted, according to Zaethan’s markers across his maps.