A Court of Lies

by Kate Avery Ellison

“There are no pirates,” he said in a strangled voice. “Are there?”

  The Nyrian queen didn’t reply.

  “Are there?” Jehn shouted.

  The queen sighed. It was a quiet sound, like a whisper of silk.

  “Of course not,” she said. When she raised her head, her eyes glimmered. “But no one will ever know that. There will be no refugees in Nyr, as I told you before. You forced me to do this, Jehn. You gave me no choice.”

  “And what now?” Jehn demanded. “What happens to them?”

  “Pirates hang,” the queen said simply. “Or sometimes, they are banished to the salt mines, or left to rot in prison.”

  “Even the children?” Jehn whispered.

  One of the queen’s eyelashes flickered as if her eye had twitched involuntarily.

  “Don’t try to manipulate me, husband-to-be,” she said. Her voice was like a blade. “It won’t end well for you, ever.”

  Jehn had no words to reply. A shiver went through him. She was a true opponent, and he had discovered this fact at significant cost.

  He had been too confident in his abilities to manipulate her, too confident in her weakness. And now, others would pay the price for his arrogance.

  His hand ached with the pain of his wound as he stared hard at the queen.

  “You monster,” he said.

  The queen’s jaw twitched. “I’ll see you at the wedding,” she said, and then signaled to the guards.

  They dragged Jehn away.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BRIAND AND COMPANY continued north, ascending the mountain in the cool damp of day. The thick tree line soon gave way to scrubby, stunted trees that straggled from the rocky soil toward the cold sunlight. Cliffs loomed all around them, and the views below—drops of thousands of feet that ended in dark shadow—took Briand’s breath away. Birds swirled in the sky above, too far away for their size to be discernable. The air was thin and crisp, and in the distance, the mountaintops looked like spears.

  “That,” Nath said, pointing at a forked mountaintop that looked like it had been split in half by a giant’s axe, “is called Begliast’s Tung, which in the old speak means tongue.”

  “Who was Begliast?” Briand asked.

  “According to the ancient myths preserved by the historian Pilias, Begliast was a great, monstrous dragon that terrorized the country until a dragonsayer defeated him,” Nath said.

  “It wasn’t Pilias,” Crispin said. “It was Rosasar.”

  Nath swung round in the saddle. “Do you ever grow tired of being a complete idiot? It was not Rosasar. Rosasar hadn’t been born yet when Pilias compiled the myths.”

  Crispin was unmoved. “I am certain it was Rosasar.”

  “Well, you are certainly wrong—seven hells!” Nath’s shout cut short as Auberon launched himself at the tutor, knocking him from his horse. They rolled on the path as a bird the size of a bull swooped over the saddle of Nath’s horse and took to the sky again. Tibus yanked his crossbow from his back and took aim as the bird wheeled and headed back toward them. The horses snorted and plunged, and Auberon pushed Nath back down as he tried to get up.

  “Don’t move,” the Seeker said crisply. “You’re so scrawny, it’s sure to think you a squirrel and go for you again.”

  Nath stared at Auberon, dazed, his mouth hanging open.

  “Briand!” Kael shouted as he turned his horse around with one hand and drew his sword with the other, but she was ahead of him—she was already in the minds of the dracules, sending them toward the bird like two spears seeking a bull’s-eye on a target. As the bird flew low, wings spread wide and talons extended to attack again, Vox leaped from the bushes onto the bird’s back, bringing it down in a tumble of feathers and claws. Sieya leaped from the rocks to join the fray, and they killed the bird quickly.

  “Lords,” Crispin whispered from where he had retreated with Nath’s horse in tow. “What is it?”

  “That’s the biggest bird I’ve ever seen in my life,” Tibus declared. “I think it mistook Nath for a jackrabbit.”

  “Or a jackass,” Crispin called.

  Auberon sat back, allowing Nath to stand. Blood trickled from the Seeker’s cheek where the bird’s talon had sliced him.

  Nath gazed at the Seeker in shock before climbing slowly to his feet, brushing dust from his shirt and trousers. He rubbed the back of his head where he’d hit it on the ground and then mounted his horse. He wore a puzzled, uncomfortable expression, and when Crispin asserted that the historian most certainly was Rosasar, he only said, “Bah” and waved a hand.

  Briand understood. It was downright unsettling to have one’s life saved by an enemy.

  They examined the carcass of the bird after she’d called the dracules away. Kael and Tibus tied the bird to one of the pack horses.

  ~

  Everyone was quiet as they made camp hours later. Kael set to work plucking the bird, his fingers quick and deft. Tibus joined him after building a fire, and they worked together with the efficiency of men who have spent years in silent companionship beside too many campfires to count. Crispin and Nath went to gather firewood, and Briand unpacked the cooking utensils and fetched water from a nearby stream to boil.

  Auberon sat near the fire, his face a mask of haughty indifference, but his eyes followed her movements. The cut on his cheek had dried, but the flesh was puckered and stiff, a canyon of a cut. It would form a nasty scar if left untended.

  She retrieved Kael’s pack and dug through it for the needle and thread she knew he kept inside. When she produced them, Auberon frowned.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head as she sat down on the log beside him.

  “Do you want a scar the size of my finger on that refined Seeker face?” she demanded.

  Auberon’s throat convulsed as he swallowed. “No,” he said.

  “Then hold still.” She threaded the needle and pulled the thread taut.

  Auberon exhaled. “Are you sure you’re the right person to do this?”

  Briand looked over her shoulder at the others. “Perhaps not, but I’m the only one who doesn’t hate you. You’re better off with me doing it.” She lifted an eyebrow. “You aren’t the first person I’ve stitched up either.”

  Auberon muttered something under his breath, but he held still and presented his cheek. Briand poured a splash of ale onto a cloth and dabbed at the cut first. Auberon hissed but didn’t move, not even to flinch.

  She could feel Kael’s eyes on her. On them.

  Her fingers brushed Auberon’s cheek as she felt for the place where she would begin sewing. Auberon stilled but did not pull away. His eyes found her and held them. His expression was a war of trust and suspicion.

  Briand felt hot and restless beneath that stare. She wanted to turn away, but she didn’t.

  She refused to cower from him.

  “Ready?” she asked, holding the needle point at his cheek.

  “Yes,” he said sourly, a muscle twitching in his jaw as she lifted the needle. His eyes tracked it and then returned to hers.

  In the war between suspicion and trust, she saw trust win out.

  Something in Briand’s chest tightened. Immediately, she felt anger.

  Why did he continue to have the power to make her feel sorrow? To make her feel regret? He was a Seeker, and he’d told her himself that they had no friendship. That they were nothing.

  And yet he was looking at her as if she’d stabbed a puppy in front of him.

  She sank the needle into the edges of his torn flesh with a little too much force. Auberon blinked rapidly and hissed between his teeth, but he did not move as she sewed the gash back together.

  Briand worked quickly, tugging the torn flesh together with the thread. When she’d finished, she cut the thread with her knife and sat back to study her handiwork.

  “Well?” Auberon asked, his mouth curling into a sardonic smile. “Does it make me look more fearsome?”

  “It makes you look like you got into a fight with a
mad tailor,” she said, and rose, tucking her knife into the sheath on her wrist.

  Auberon lifted his gloved hands and gingerly felt the stitches. His chains clinked.

  He didn’t thank her. She didn’t wait for him to.

  As she moved to the other side of the fire, she saw Kael watching her curiously. She pretended not to notice.

  The bird, once skinned, was put over the fire to roast. The smell drew everyone to the fire again. Briand practiced flipping her knife and catching it without looking. Kael mended a worn stirrup. Tibus sharpened his sword. Crispin talked, but no one was listening. Nath stared at Auberon as if he could discover the answer to a great secret in the planes of the Seeker’s face.

  When the meat was cooked, they passed it around.

  Nath cleared his throat uncomfortably as he looked at Auberon, who was eating awkwardly with his chained hands making things difficult.

  “You saved my life,” he said.

  Auberon snorted. “We need you for the mission. I can only imagine what weeping and gnashing of teeth there’d be from this lot if you died, and I need everyone to be clear-headed and focused.”

  “Right,” Nath said.

  But he still gave the extra piece of meat to the Seeker.

  And Auberon still accepted it.

  ~

  Another day of riding. Another interminable lecture from Nath about the region they traversed. When the company made camp at nightfall, they drank ale from Nath’s pack and finished the rest of the meat. After they’d eaten, Nath pulled a pack of Dubbok cards from his pocket and dropped them on the tree stump. “Put your money where your mouth is,” he said to Kael.

  Crispin grabbed the cards and began to shuffle them. “Challenge accepted.”

  “Nobody challenged you,” Nath said, waving a hand as if flicking away a fly.

  Crispin was undeterred.

  Kael sat, his mouth halfway to a bemused smile, his eyes cool and steady. “Are you ready to eat your words, old friend?”

  “I’m ready to watch you be trounced in front of these witnesses,” Nath said.

  Briand watched them in amusement from where she sat on one of the rock formations, feet dangling.

  “You don’t get to play,” Nath said, stabbing a finger in her direction. “You literally killed someone the last time you played Dubbok. You’ve proved everything you have to prove, dragonsayer.”

  “You just don’t want me to beat you in front of Crispin,” she said archly.

  Nath snorted instead of answering. His eyes cut to Auberon, sitting by the fire alone, and he called out, “Hey, Scarface, do you play?”

  Auberon turned to look at him, startled, and so did Crispin.

  So did all of them.

  The campsite was silent.

  “A little,” Auberon said stiffly after a pause.

  Nath pointed at the tree stump, and Auberon hesitated, then stood to his feet with the gravity of a man going to his own funeral. He strode to the stump, his chains rattling, and sat down on one of the fallen trunks lying around it. Crispin inched away, but Nath only slammed a hand down in front of the Seeker brusquely before continuing to deal. Auberon picked up the cards and examined them with a somber expression. Across the stump, Tibus was making a similarly unhappy face.

  Crispin, who had the emotional subtlety of a sheepdog, was grinning like a fool.

  “It isn’t any fun if you tell everyone exactly what you’ve got in your hand, Crispin,” Nath said with exasperation.

  Crispin pinched his lips together in an effort to contain his glee.

  “You look like a fish,” Nath said. He laid down a card with a flourish, and the game began.

  Auberon, it turned out, was terrible at Dubbok.

  “You’re the worst Dubbok player I’ve ever seen,” Briand observed as Auberon tried to play a queen card with his soldier, losing the game for himself and handing the victory to Kael, who scooped up the stones with an arch of his brow in Nath’s direction.

  “You can’t count that round,” Nath protested angrily. “Scarface practically handed you the game!”

  Auberon looked a bewildered at his loss. He stared at the cards and then at the others’ faces as if coming to a sudden, unpleasant realization about himself.

  “I take it back,” Nath said, petulant now. “I don’t care if you saved my life a thousand times, you’re out of the game.”

  “I think he adds something special to the table,” Kael said with a tug of his lips. “A refreshing randomness.”

  “Losing like that is its own kind of talent,” Tibus rumbled in amusement.

  Auberon smiled thinly. He appeared unbothered by their insults. “You forget, I can read minds. Usually, this game is a little less challenging to someone like me.”

  “So, you cheat?” Briand said.

  Auberon scowled indignantly. “I use my natural proclivities, the same as any person who knows how to read a tell or observe body language properly.”

  “I recall Kael using a similar argument regarding his magic-tuned reflexes,” Nath muttered, looking disconcerted at the thought that Auberon might have anything in common with Kael.

  “So, you cheat,” Briand repeated. She was smiling now. The ale had warmed her blood. She felt happy, here under the stars with Kael and Nath and Tibus just like old times, and she was relaxed and loose, her words coming out more teasingly than she’d planned.

  Auberon surprised them all by laughing. “And it is glorious. Usually, I am the best at the table. But it is very boring.”

  “When you never have to try, sure…” Nath muttered. But a reluctant smile tugged at his lips too, and Briand knew that the stars and the firelight and the present company had softened even Nath’s crabby heart. There was something magical and right about the night. Auberon didn’t feel like an enemy anymore. He was just another cranky, aloof individual in their ragtag party. The war didn’t exist, the loyalties and bad blood didn’t exist. It was just them and the wilderness, and the insults they cheerfully traded as the cards were dealt again and another round of ale passed from hand to hand. Kael won again, Nath hissed something about dumb luck, and then Crispin managed to win a round, and Nath was nearly apoplectic. Then he triumphed, and won three times in a row after that, and was very smug about it.

  Crispin kept stealing glances at Auberon, who was sitting at the Dubbok table with the indignant gravitas of a hog-tied lion.

  “What is it, boy?” Auberon finally asked with a faint sneer.

  Tibus straightened where he sat beside Crispin, and even Nath looked up and frowned.

  “H-have you ever seen something you didn’t want to see?” Crispin asked, emboldened by Tibus and Nath’s attention.

  Auberon’s eyes flickered, and his nostrils flared. “Yes. Lords, yes. All the time.” He snickered. “It’s horrifying.”

  “Really?” Crispin asked.

  “One time,” Auberon said, and paused.

  Crispin leaned forward with interest. Tibus lifted his eyebrows. Even Nath, though he pretended to be studying his cards, was listening.

  Auberon had the sleek satisfaction of a cat now that he had captured their attention. “One time, I looked into a man’s mind, and he was in love with his sister—”

  The whole table erupted in groans.

  “Or the woman,” Auberon continued with relish, spurred on by the reaction he’d gotten, “who compulsively drank her own urine.”

  “What?” Tibus demanded.

  “Oh yes,” Auberon assured him. “The whole time, she was trying not to think of it so I wouldn’t see. Of course, that only made it more obvious to me.”

  Kael cut a glance at Briand as he quietly dealt the cards again. Crispin snatched up his without looking at them.

  “And then there was the time,” Auberon said, “I discovered while searching through a man’s head for Monarchist sympathies—”

  He stopped.

  Silence fell. The smiles dropped from everyone’s faces as the atmosphere grew frosty.
Crispin dropped his gaze to his cards, and Tibus leaned back and muttered something under his breath. Nath snapped at Kael to begin the game.

  Just like that, they remembered he was their enemy once more.

  How had they forgotten?

  They finished the game and retreated to their bedrolls in silence.

  ~

  In the morning, the wind changed, blowing from the north, and it had a bite to it that suggested snow. They mounted up and rode up the slope of the mountain, heading higher and higher, until they were above the clouds, with the trees thinning and snow dusting the crooked path before them. They reached the top, and the sight of the world from the pinnacle of the mountain made Briand feel small and vast at the same time. A kind of pleasurable loneliness coiled in her belly, and she felt lost, but not sad. Vulnerable, but not weak.

  Beside her, Kael exhaled quietly. “Something about the Wild Lands always makes me feel as though I lived a thousand years,” he said. “I feel the ghosts of the men and women who walked these trails for centuries. And this beauty—it is harsh, and challenging. You must work hard to gaze upon it. After Estria, I think perhaps these are my favorite lands.”

  “You like the wild things,” Briand said, and looked at him with a hint of a smile on her mouth.

  “I do,” he agreed, looking at that smile. Or rather, at her mouth. His eyes were dark and soft, and the wind ruffled his hair and blew the edge of his collar against his jaw. Briand wanted to reach up and sink her fingers into his hair and fold herself against him to listen to his heart and smell the scent of him.

  But the rest of the company was behind them, and so she settled for sharing the same space as him in warm silence as she turned back to the scene of the mountain range stretching before them, the mountains like dark green behemoths rising to graze among the clouds.

  After breakfast, the company mounted their horses and began the descent into the valley beyond.

  “There,” Kael said, pointing. “That pass between the mountains. That is our aim.”

  It would not be long now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN