She stumbled forward and tried not to trip over her feet, which, thanks to a woman shoving her, proved to be difficult. It took every ounce of strength Sathryn had not to turn around and kick her. Up ahead, Julian called out, “Hurry up,” prompting Etzimek to move faster.
After a while, the surge died down before a raised platform. Someone in the crowd pushed forward and rang a large, brass bell three times. From where she stood, she could tell the one ringing the bell was a Lynot, the pale-green skin contrasting with his dark-green hair plaited down to his midback. Lynots had eyes like reptiles—yellow, like a pit of flames—and skin like that of a lizard. She didn’t trust them. He shouted something—a language she didn’t know and couldn’t understand—and from under the platform, a man appeared. He was old. She could see the wrinkled skin hanging from his narrow cheekbones like a curtain. But no matter how old he seemed, his power and effect on the crowd were unquestionable.
The Chlork rested on the man’s raised arm. The man retrieved the box from the dragon’s mouth and held it high for the crowd to see. Everyone silenced. The dragon flew away.
“That’s most likely a message from the rebel camp in Richarta,” Julian whispered.
Sathryn tore her eyes from the old man in front to look at Julian. “How would you know?”
The man on the platform pulled a rolled slip of parchment from the black box.
Julian smiled, then snapped his lips closed again. But it was too late—Sathryn had already spotted his unusually pointed canines. A chill froze her spine—he wasn’t fully human. “‘How would I know,’” he teased. “They have been communicating with us back and forth for weeks now. That dragon you saw belongs to Lord Mikel in Richarta. He probably wants to plan another attack against the kings, but only because the last attempt went so well.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“The last one?” The man on the platform was now reading the message to himself and ignoring the crowd’s angst. Etzimek especially seemed tightly wound, but that may have been because he couldn’t find their mother.
Julian nodded. “Yes, the last one. And the one before that. And before that . . . A few months ago, Mikel sent over three thousand men against the Dragon Kings, and about two thousand of them were slaughtered. No one trusts him now—that was his worst idea yet. He’s insane if he expects to get more men.”
“Either that, or he thinks we’re crazy enough to give them to him.” The rebel army was news to her. The kings weren’t the most generous rulers, but did they deserve to have armies sent after them?
“I’ve never heard a truer statement,” said Julian with a light laugh.
“Who’s the man on the platform?” Sathryn asked him.
He directed his attention back toward the old man. “He’s been given plenty of names. His true name is unknown, so we just call him Dominus. He’s the commander of Deadland. His ancestors ruled before the Dragon Kings. Most people still consider him royalty.”
At that, the woman in front of them turned and hushed them, glaring at Julian before moving farther up front. Dominus had yet to speak, and the crowd was on edge.
“What happened?” Sathryn asked.
Julian looked back at the woman. “We shouldn’t talk about it here. We might start another civil war.” The lilt in his voice suggested he was joking, but his hard expression let Sathryn know otherwise.
“Oh,” she said instead.
Dominus had begun speaking. “Citizens.” His voice carried with it years of wisdom and power. “This is a message from Lord Mikel in Richarta. He plans to attack the Dragon Kings in a week and is in desperate need of more men.” There was a groan from the crowd. “He needs at least seven hundred more, so I’m sending some of ours to fight—”
The crowd erupted in indignant shouts.
“My son is still missing from the last battle—”
“—and nothing good has happened—”
“—keep sending men—”
“Reckless!”
“Useless!”
“Ridiculous.” Julian huffed. “Absolutely ridiculous. If we go out there, the kings will slice us up like last time. Why don’t they ever use a different tactic?”
“Silence, everyone!” Dominus yelled from the platform. “I have no other choice. Shall I stand here idle, waiting around until this war is over, and watch people’s homes burn, their loved ones killed? If we don’t fight, this war won’t end, and the kings will rule forever. They will punish us—send out their horrid Beastmen to burn our lands and raid our villages and mistreat our women and children! Steal our food, poison our water! They have done it before, so why not again? Perhaps . . . perhaps none of you understand now, but you will later, and you’ll thank me when you do.”
Unconvinced murmurs rippled through the crowd. Sathryn looked to Julian, whose eyes were locked on Dominus.
“A league of my guards will pass through each home sometime tomorrow evening. All able-bodied men will be sent to my quarters to arm themselves and meet Mikel’s men by the river around dawn.” The finality of his words suggested he wasn’t to be argued with, so he exited the platform and disappeared beneath it as the crowd called to him.
“They’ll die out there,” Julian muttered.
Etzimek tugged at her arm. She turned and was about to scold him when she saw her mother standing not far from where they stood. She looked flushed as she had all day, but brightened as soon as her eyes met theirs. She rushed to Sathryn and Etzimek to hug them as Julian hung back and observed.
“Where were you two?” she asked.
Etzimek spoke before Sathryn could breathe. “Sathryn fell behind is all. I stayed with her to make sure she was okay.”
“No.” Sathryn cast a glare at Etzimek. He pretended not to see. “Some man attacked me in the crowd and injected me with a venom. But I’m okay now, thanks to Julian.” She turned to look at Julian, who had been standing behind her, only to find he was no longer there. Looking among the crowd, she could not pick his face out from the others. “He was just . . .”
Her mother looked exasperated. “Come on.” She yanked Sathryn toward her. “We have to get to our cabin.”
It was hardly a cabin. The hut was identical to the ones around it, save a small placard that read A191. Inside, a Lynot woman and her herd of children sat around a small mat. When the woman looked up and saw Sathryn, Etzimek, and their mother, her reptilian features stretched into a smile. “There are four beds, so I figured we could split them two and two.”
Her mother nodded, and the Lynot left the tent, dragging her children behind her. Exhausted, Sathryn’s mother collapsed on the bed and closed her eyes.
“Take this time to rest,” she said.
“I have a question,” said Sathryn.
Etzimek narrowed his eyes. “Sathryn, Mother is exhausted. Let her rest before you pester her with your questions.”
Sathryn ignored him. “Mother, why did we come here?”
No response. Her mother gave her a look that warned her to stop speaking.
“Where is my father?” Sathryn asked. He hadn’t accompanied them on the trip to Deadland and had been gone for weeks before Sathryn, Etzimek, and their mother left. “Is he dead?”
“No.” Etzimek stood near their mother, an arm resting on her shoulder.
Sathryn waited a long time, but no one said anything else. Her mother stared at her as if she had grown a second head. “Well, Julian tells me that people are rebelling against our kings, which means they’re not as generous as you’ve made them out to be.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t be listening to strange boys you meet off the street,” Etzimek muttered.
“Things have changed in the last few weeks,” her mother said. “You won’t understand.”
“How about you let me decide what I do and don’t understand,” Sathryn refuted. “What’s changed? The kings have been ruling for as long as I can remember, yet somehow everything has changed in the last few weeks. Father has been gone a long time. Where di
d he go?”
Etzimek let go of their mother’s shoulder and made his way toward Sathryn, but their mother pulled him back. “Your father made a wrong decision, and we have to pay the consequences along with him. He snuck off in the middle of the night four weeks ago to join a rebel army, leaving me with nothing but a note.” Tears pooled in her mother’s eyes. “I didn’t know what happened to him until a few nights ago, when I got a letter from Kingsland addressing his trial date. He’s in prison, Sathryn. And I thought—I was so blindsided by our privilege that I never even saw how—how—how terrible those kings are. The letter . . .”
From her pocket, she pulled out a crumpled piece of ivory-colored paper, handing it to Sathryn, who could hardly read it. The words were faded along with the wrinkles of the page, as if opened and read a thousand times over. “The letter said that if found guilty, he would be publicly executed. If we didn’t attend the trial, Sathryn, we would be hunted down and pinned up there with him. And I . . . I can’t watch that happen to him.”
“So we left.” Sathryn knew she should have been crying, but that was hard when all she felt was anger. Julian had said that rebel groups were ripped apart by the kings. Why had her father been captured? “When is his trial?”
Her mother was sobbing.
“Three weeks from today.” Etzimek’s impassive expression was broken only by his shiny eyes.
“Can’t we save him somehow?”
Etzimek reached over, gripping her arm with his steel hand and pulling her to him. “No more questions.”
She was ready to pull away and argue, but the look on his face suggested that it was best for her not to say a word. He hauled her to their bed, then lay down on his side with his back to her.
“Get some rest,” he began. “It’s been a long day, and you must be exhausted.”
Within minutes, her mother’s cries had trickled down to soft, slow breathing, and Etzimek’s snores could be heard half a world away.
Sutra
ow long would it take for Iryse to realize that Sutra wasn’t interested in his sadistic ramblings?
Given, for quite a while, Sutra had been interested in his ramblings, so it was natural for Iryse to think that he was interested in them now.
Sutra wasn’t interested. Not anymore.
Sutra sat in the library, an enormous room lined with rows of novels in dark-brown, wooden cases, and sipped a glass of red wine. The library relaxed him. Whenever Iryse exploded into another tangent of killing and war and rebels, Sutra retreated to the library—his library—and waited until Iryse was again thinking as rationally as someone like Iryse could.
Sutra blamed everyone for his displeasure at this point, including himself, which took a long time and a lot of audacity. It was his fault too—his fault that he was the way he was. Immortal. Inhuman. Merciless. He was trying to improve on the last one since the first two were things he couldn’t fix. But for Iryse, all three were unfixable.
Four hundred years ago—it seemed such a long time and a short time—all four of his brothers (and regrettably, himself) had taken a drug that did more than they’d bargained for.
Four hundred years ago, they had been great kings. No one alive now other than himself and his four brothers had been there to see it, but they were great. They had inherited the title of kings from their uncle rather than their father, who was too sick to carry on his ruling, so he gave the position of king to his brother, Ketru. When Ketru died after a long and successful reign, he appointed all five of the brothers rather than just one—he always had a firm belief in oligarchic powers rather than only one source of authority.
For a while—a few years, even—they ruled under balance. Looking back on it, the balance came from the position of authority being fun—feasts and parties almost every night, music and dancing, plays, games—he could go on forever. Even the memory of it made him smile. Back then, they had been brothers. All five of them. Iryse was always the oldest, always a bit more commanding, but it was okay. All five of them—Iryse, Sutra, Tyru, Rowyn, and Nya—they all led together, happy and balanced.
Around the fourth year of their rule, Iryse got more and more out of hand. Nya had noticed first—Sutra was just the only one who seemed bothered by it, even if it was only slightly. Up until recently, Sutra hadn’t been bothered enough by his eldest brother to do something.
He noticed when Iryse began loving the power a bit more than usual. It was small steps first—undermining his brothers on small decisions, hiring servants without their approval, things that Sutra hadn’t seen as warning signs until now. When the brothers confronted Iryse with their concerns, he apologized and all was well again.
Then, small steps turned to big steps. He was drinking too much in a night, was inviting hordes of women to the castle. He was reckless with money; gold pieces that usually went to poorer regions ended up with Iryse instead in the form of a new golden harp or a velvet robe. They had confronted him about this, and he was less nonchalant. He accused them all of going against him, trying to knock him off the throne.
Iryse considered the role of king as a game of gladiators around the time of the seasonal festivals. During two festivals a year, they used to parade around all six regions in a horse-drawn carriage to greet the regions, giving them sweets and gifts and money if they needed it (they had stopped parading around after taking that drug). The crowds, after three or four years of having a legion of kings rather than just one, had begun choosing favorites among the five. Tyru was never a favorite, but he didn’t mind. People didn’t love him, not because he was rude, but because he was quiet and reserved. Unlike Sutra, who always enjoyed riding through the regions and waving to the people.
Many people favored Sutra.
Nya was also a favorite. He was the youngest of the brothers and always looked like it. Even now, four hundred years later, he was frozen in his young face. The crowds loved it, especially younger girls. Rowyn was well respected and stuck out because of his enigma. It was an enigma different from quiet Tyru. Tyru’s quiet had no backbone—at least, not until he took the drug—but Rowyn’s quiet was always like he was hiding something.
No one liked Iryse, and unlike Tyru, he cared. He wasn’t social like Sutra or charming like Nya, wasn’t enigmatic like Rowyn. All he had to his advantage was his position as the eldest.
It must have gotten to him. One morning, instead of riding through the streets for festivals like the other four did, he stayed home and drank and fooled around with people he wasn’t supposed to. And his motives as king became less about caring for the people and more about punishing those that didn’t like him.
He tended to push the limits. This wasn’t news to Sutra or anyone else—even as kids, a game of chess could turn into Iryse throwing blows. It wasn’t so much that he went overboard as it was how he went overboard.
If someone committed a major crime, they were sent to Kingsland, as they were now, but now it was a bit different. Now, your trial did as much for you as doing nothing did, perhaps even worse. Trials were just entertainment—seeing the criminal hope for a chance to plead not guilty just for him to realize that he wasn’t allowed to speak and would be charged guilty no matter what.
But trials back then had been fair. All five brothers sat and told Iryse what happened, then the criminal told his side of the story, then all five kings questioned him. The jury voted and found the criminal guilty or not guilty. If he was guilty, he was sent to prison and served a sentence. Now, prison was the place you waited until death—a public execution no matter the crime.
Iryse began torturing the prisoners.
They’d found out about Iryse’s torture chamber through rumors from the servants—screams coming from the prison, and Iryse nowhere to be found while it was happening. Again, Nya had told Sutra of the rumors. Back then, Nya and Sutra couldn’t have been closer had they shared the same body.
Nya and Sutra had both descended into the prison one night to find Iryse in a room he’d built without them know
ing, leaning over a body stretched over a table. The body—a middle-aged Faerie woman—squirmed desperately away from Iryse, who held a large vial of white liquid over her body, but she was tied tight to the table. He turned the vial over, and Nya and Sutra both watched in horror as the white dropped onto an already raw patch of skin, sizzling and crackling against her flesh. The woman screamed the most wretched scream Sutra had ever heard, but Iryse did not seem bothered by it. In fact, Iryse was so enveloped in his cruelty that he hadn’t seen them enter.
Sutra could still hear that scream now.
That night, Nya and Sutra had talked to Iryse themselves, this time without the other brothers. Though he’d been shaded by it before, Nya told Sutra on that day that he saw the reckless way their eldest brother was headed, and it scared him.
For four hundred years old, Sutra had an exceptional memory. It was probably from the drug.
“What was the white liquid?” Sutra had asked Iryse on that night. He, Nya, and Iryse were all in Iryse’s room.
That was all Sutra had to say. Iryse acted confused. “White liquid?”
Nya stayed quiet, but his hands were shaking. From anger, perhaps, but more likely from fear. He was so much younger than Iryse, and whenever Iryse looked as he had on that night—wild eyed, irrational—Nya acted even more inferior.
So Sutra spoke for him. “Yes. White liquid. Don’t pretend as though you don’t understand what I speak of. This—torture chamber you have down in the prison—no, it must go.”
Iryse crossed his arms over his broadened chest and glared at them both. “Why? They are criminals. Criminals deserve punishment.”
“Torture, Iryse? Really? Don’t you think serving time in prison is enough? If word of this gets out, the people will hate you. Hate us,” Sutra added.
Iryse shrugged. “Does it matter if they hate us? We rule over them, so if they hate us, that’s at their expense, not ours. It was Duch Snake venom, if you’re curious, but when you use it on prisoners, put it on the soft skin. All it does when they drink it is make them sick. Vomit everywhere—it’s a chore cleaning it up.”
Embers of Empire Page 2