by Anna Holmes
“Not a single one of us saw him in person during the planning and execution of the siege, yet orders came under his name as if he were observing in person. People who disobeyed them were transferred without warning, maybe not to be heard from again. You can see how that starts to sound like a ghost story.”
I take a step and find that the good leg seems to about as reliable as the bad. Tressa lunges and catches me under the arms. “Perhaps some rest,” she suggests as she hauls me back up, a forcefulness hiding behind the perhaps.
“I have class in an hour—”
“And they will praise your name for failing to show up to it,” she says, helping me to the door. A pair of guards outside tighten as we pass. Tressa gives them a curt nod. “You’re still quite blue,” she informs me from the corner of her mouth.
“So I’ll become someone else’s boogeyman. A cautionary tale about not letting your head get too big, or trusting too much, or following blindly or something.”
“I appreciate the thought you’re putting into this, but given you just exploded a little bit, I think you get to have a lie down whether it's convenient or not.”
She props open the door to the tower and looks down at me expectantly. I run my hand through my hair, sigh, and dutifully limp inside. “Are you going after Jori again?”
“Unless Riley manages to talk your Queen out of it, which I don’t think he’s eager to do.”
“You’re going to need a caster.”
“And I suppose that’s meant to be you volunteering?”
I hold out a hand to the wall to steady myself for a moment. “You know what she’s capable of. You need someone to cancel her out.”
Tressa holds out her hands in my direction. “Look at you! You’re having a hard time getting up the steps!”
“I always have a hard time getting up the steps.”
“You know what I mean. You just set yourself on fire, Alain.”
“And I would rather not take the castle with me if and perhaps when it gets worse,” I reply pointedly. Her eyes sink shut and she holds a breath prisoner in her chest. I know the feeling. My own guts lurch, and it’s not just whatever malady came with my enhancement. “We can’t ignore it. Much as Caelin would like to—hells, I would like to. I’m getting worse.”
Tressa keeps her eyes on a crack in the next stair. “I’ll…talk to them.”
I keep lurching my way upward. “Good. And stow the pity. I got what I signed up for.”
Chapter Ten
Caelin
There is a large house in the mountains at the edge of the royal city. Its wooden walls and shutters are unpainted and it’s always surrounded by guards, who snap to attention as I ride up. I let my hood drop and peer up at the looming structure. Stark as it is, smoke puffs up merrily from a pair of chimneys, and the garden is lovingly kept in fastidious furrows.
This is Eastridge House, and it was built with one inhabitant in mind, though he doesn’t live alone now. I tie Navigator’s reins to a fence post and place a hand to his large face. “Only be a moment,” I promise.
Inside, the modest wood furnishings have gathered a fine layer of dust. Blue padded training armor sits in a heap on top of a rocking chair next to an unattended fire. I edge in further toward the kitchen, where August cleans up after dinner— or a few dinners, by the looks of the number of dishes. He lifts his head and nearly drops his stack of plates in surprise as I enter. “Your Highness!” His voice cracks and he coughs to disguise it a little. “I mean, it’s good to see you.”
“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” I say, slinging my cloak from my shoulders and hanging it on the peg next to the door. His sword leans against the wall in its patchwork scabbard, and despite the weariness I can feel in the marrow, I smile a little. “Good day at training?”
“A long one.”
“I know the feeling.” The rest of the house is still, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. “How’s he doing?” I ask quietly.
August rubs at his chin. The smallest patch of ginger stubble is burgeoning there, and I wonder how long it’s been since I visited. It could have been months or it could have been last week, at the rate this boy keeps shooting up. “Oh, you know,” he says listlessly. “Good days, bad days.”
“Which is it today?”
“A little more toward the bad.” He tilts his head in the direction of the long, dark hallway behind us. “Do you want to see him?”
“I…actually have some questions for him,” I say, wincing. “Any other time, I’d wait, but….”
“The prince?” he asks, mirroring my sympathetic flinch.
Brilliant. It’s gotten around. We’re more than used to that. Once in the early days of my recovery, Alain put his hand on my back to steady me and for weeks we were hearing about how he was probably making me sicker. This, though…this is dangerous. “What have you heard?”
His face reddens. “I’m sorry, Your Highness—”
“Caelin,” I correct for the millionth time. “I’m not angry, August. I’m just wondering what distortions are making their way around the city.”
He still keeps his eyes to the floorboards. “Just…that he fainted because you’re not letting him cast.”
Well, at least there aren’t whispers about what the Legion tried to turn him into, but that’s frustrating for other reasons. I bite the tip of my tongue to keep from sputtering something undignified. “That’s…not quite it. The truth is— well, it can’t leave this house. Am I understood?”
August nods somberly and adjusts his precarious dish pile. “I’ll put these away, and then we can talk to him.”
“Here.”
I grab about half of the dishes off the top so he doesn’t have to balance them under his chin and help stack them into the cupboard. “I didn’t know queens did dishes,” he says with a timid smile.
“Oh, perhaps not often,” I say with a bit of a grin, nudging his narrow shoulder with mine as we move to the hall. “But a good one knows how to do a bit of everything, I think.”
August strikes a match and lights a lamp without breaking stride. “Meaning no offense, y—Caelin, but I think you’re a bit odd as far as queens go.”
I laugh. “I should hope so.”
We come to a shut door. Light peeks out from underneath, and I can hear the faint sound of something bubbling. August knocks and peeks his head in. “Gav? We have a visitor.”
“FINALLY,” he bellows. “Come in already!”
August pushes the door open and looks at me a little apprehensively. “It’s all right,” I mouth and step inside.
What was faint bubbling on the other side of the door proves to be multiple burners on the bare floor. Their minder lies on his stomach, watching the roiling, brightly colored contents carefully through a cloud of sticky-sweet smelling steam. He picks his head up. “If it isn’t my favorite princess.”
“She’s Queen, Gav,” August reminds him quietly.
“Oh? Is that so? Congratulations are in order, then!”
I swallow around the lump in my throat. Gavroth has congratulated me on my coronation at least seven times. “Thank you,” I say, bending to examine his work. “What’s cooking?”
“Nothing you’d want to drink, that’s for sure,” he chuckles, shifting from his elbows to sitting back on his haunches. He watches me watching him and waves me off preemptively. “Don’t fret. Alchemy is all muscle memory, and it’s just my brain memory that’s been buggered with. All perfectly safe.”
August grumbles, “Or it would be, if you’d actually use the bench instead of spreading out over the entire floor.”
“You fuss like Mother.”
“Someone has to in this house.”
“My alchemist’s fire is specifically formulated to stop burning if it meets wood, hair, or skin,” Gavroth informs me. “And still he clucks at me like a hen.”
“How’d you manage that?” I ask, fighting the urge to poke a finger in one of the globs of molten ore in their
glass dishes.
“I have a lot of time on my hands.”
I, unfortunately, do not. I have Riley making some of the arrangements back at the castle, but there are things to be packed and very specific instructions to be given. This will be the first time I’ve been away for more than a day or two since my last clandestine foray into the vestiges of the Legion. I glance at August, who seems a little more relaxed, perched on the edge of the unused workbench. “Gavroth,” I start slowly. “I’m sorry this isn’t a more social call, but I was hoping I could ask some questions about your work during the war. Do you….”
All at once, his face twists into a glower. “Yes, everything before the knife to the neck is intact,” he snaps.
August sighs. “Gav.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, a little of his ruddy anger fleeing his face. “I tend to just blurt on the bad days.”
I nod. “How’s it feeling?”
He turns the left side of his face to me. A snarled vine of a raised white scar snakes its way through his thick red beard. At the very crook where his ear meets his neck, blue lines dart into his hairline. Everything the Legion wreaks on us is blue. “It’s not pretty, but I wasn’t much of a looker before, either.”
“It looks better,” I tell him, and I mean it. The first time I visited, the blue tangles threatened the whole half of his face, his eye as swollen as if he took a fist to it.
“Still hurts like the devils if I bump it.”
Unbidden, my hand finds my collarbone. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
“That poison’s a bitch and a half.”
August looks at the ceiling. “The Queen, Gav!”
“I’ve said worse,” I say with a shrug. “And he’s right.”
Gavroth taps a flask of purple liquid, watching the ripples carefully. “Is it poisons you want to ask about? Because honestly, that was always Cole’s bag. Mine was more…structural than deadly.”
“Well…sort of.” I sit on the floor now, too. The rising steam and its spun sugar smell has started to get my head a little light. “Have you worked with cryst?”
“Sure. All Legion engineers are trained with it.”
“Any work with cryst and people? For General Pell?”
The room goes quiet, aside from the bubbling. “Most of us in Elyssia did some,” he says slowly. “A lot of us got assigned to his unit for a very short time.”
“Including you?”
He nods. “But we were designing containment breach treatments for airship personnel. Or that’s what we were told. I thought it was odd. Pell was more interested in new and exciting ways to kill enemies. Safety is the sort of thing that gets delegated to lieutenants.”
“Gavroth,” I say, leaning forward. “He put cryst in Alain somehow, and it’s…degrading? Something.”
His large face slowly shifts from shock to confusion to anger to something stuck in the center of all three, his light blue eyes darting from one side of the room to the other as he tries to put all this together. “He couldn’t— it’d go volatile. Unless….”
“Unless he had a containment breach treatment handy?” I guess.
He stands up abruptly, unseating August with a tap to the knee. He rifles through the bench’s drawer for a tablet and a pen. In almost a fugue, he starts writing. I come to look over his shoulder. The string of letters and numbers and symbols couldn’t look any more like a code to my untrained eyes. At his other elbow, August looks on, a little lost. “What’re you doing, Gav?”
“Writing down what I came up with.” He glances over to me. “It may not do you much good, if mine isn’t the script they went with, and the variables could be…you know what? Can I see him?”
Warmth floods me for the first time in days. Someone who might know a sliver of what’s happening here, someone on our side. I pull at his massive arm in the direction of the door and laugh my relief. “Yes, gods, yes, please.”
August looks between us nervously. “Are you sure? You haven’t been out since…”
“I know, and I am bored, boy,” Gavroth answers. “I still have boots around here somewhere, yeah?” He pauses. “Oh. Best stop these burners. Tell you what— Queen, was it?” I nod, and he shoots me a sideways grin. “Meet you downstairs in ten minutes and tell your guards I’m not coming back here till I’ve got that prince of yours sorted out.”
“Do you mean that?” I ask. “Because there might be some travel involved.”
He takes off down the hall. “Even better!” he roars.
August watches him go and rubs at the back of his neck. “Well, it’s good to see him excited, I guess. Are the guards coming, too?”
I hesitate. They’re posted here because the people who tried to kill Gavroth might very well like to finish the job. Especially if it becomes known he’s helping us untangle Alain. But the fewer people who know, the better. “I think we can handle it, hmm? Couple of sword hands?”
Now he grins a little too. “I’ll get my things.”
It’s Gavroth’s first visit to the Royal City, and it couldn’t be going better, as far as he’s concerned. Navigator isn’t thrilled about Gavroth’s booming voice, which gets louder with each successive new excitement, but I’m just pleased someone’s happy around here. By the time we reach the castle, I think the guards back at Eastridge can probably still hear him. “This is your house?” he exclaims by way of a question, looking up at the spires and the vines trailing up them in the dark.
“Well, it also houses several governmental functions, like my advisors and the Parliament chambers and the headquarters of the guard,” I say.
“But you LIVE here.”
“Yes. I live here.” I pass off Navigator to a waiting stablehand, who flinches a little. Navigator behaves himself for once, apparently only too content to be led away from the enthusiastic shouting.
“It’s built into the ruddy mountain! August, lad, are you seeing this?”
August looks up at the clouds gathering over head. “This is where I go to train. So yeah.”
Gavroth shakes his head. “How quickly the shine wears off.”
Across the drawbridge, Jarven and a steward hurry up to us. My stomach sinks a little watching their approach. Well past nightfall and there’s still so much to do. I make sure the earring is fastened securely, then clasp a hand to August’s shoulder. “I have some things to take care of. We’ll have you set up in some guest chambers and see you in the morning. Thank you both. Truly.”
Jarven watches them follow the steward in, Gavroth still marveling every few feet, August still thoroughly bemused. “If only all your guests could be so…exuberantly impressed with the facilities.”
“Is that sarcasm I detect, Jarven?”
“Quite the opposite, Highness,” he assures me as we start for his office. “Respectfully, after dealing with His Majesty the Prince of Folgia, it’s refreshing to see someone appreciate our rustic capitol.”
“You’ll have to forgive Daryon. He’s not used to roughing it in castles with only five turrets.”
Jarven covers a laugh with a dignified throat clear, then rushes ahead to open his door for me. “Lieutenant Bannon has briefed us on the plans for your departure,” he begins, closing the door behind us. “Far be it from me to question….”
I let my exhausted body drop into the chair in front of his desk. “Why do you think I’m here? I would rather entertain your questions than leave you wondering, and I trust you to keep it respectful.”
Jarven lowers himself behind his desk, his dark hands quickly smoothing aside piles of papers as though I’ve caught him in the shameful act of untidiness. He should see my desk. The enormity of his stands in stark contrast with his narrow airfolk frame, and the impression of hesitation that gives completely belies the fearsomeness with which he tackles everything from party preparations to diplomatic negotiations to supply manifests. I don’t doubt that if I asked him to track down Pell himself he would make the very best stab at it. He looks at me and pushes out a
preternaturally strong breath. “Why now?” he asks.
“This stays between us,” I caution.
“Of course.”
The earring stays blessedly quiet, and the muscles between my shoulders uncoil a little. “I don’t think Pell is sending his envoy for the cryst thieves. The prince has a suspicion it’s…something to do with the slave camps, something that still isn’t entirely clear. Something that could well come to blows if we don’t get in front of it.”
Jarven looks a little stricken. “All due respect, Your Highness, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend alerting the Admiral, the Captain, and the General of potential hostilities.”
“I know. And that’s why you’re good at your job.” I lean forward. “And they, despite our differences, are good at theirs. But realistically, we are bound by the unspoken terms of our treaty with Rosalia. This is the first contact we’ve received since the signing. If we were to start amassing troops in response, which might well be the only thing General Morris and Admiral Hawke ever agree on, Rosalia will almost certainly take that as a pretext to war. Whether or not this island could withstand another sustained assault…is a matter of some disagreement. I’d rather not test the arguments.”
He nods, his light gray eyes trained on his desktop. “What do you need?”
“Time. Every bit of it you can buy me, in the cabinet chambers and with the envoy. Reroute them from the Northern Shore to here. Allow Morris and Hawke to believe that I’m personally hunting the rest of the pirates to make a favorable impression with the envoy, and that I need to move quietly to do so. I do need that, actually. No honor guards, no local officials, no prearranged accommodations. If the envoy sends word to Pell that I’m investigating the camps again, the ruse is pretty well dead.”
“You can understand the consternation about you taking off without a guard.”
“All too well. But the larger the contingent, the harder it is to keep quiet.” I lean forward. “I truly believe our best chance at coming out the other side of this safely is an abundance of carefully disguised caution.”