The Exalted

by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson

  “I’ll douse Gadrian’s flames in my own spit before I’ll ever trust you again, Curlin.”

  She sighed and ran a hand over the auburn stubble that’d sprouted from her scalp over the past few weeks. “Don’t be so dramatic. Now, if you’re serious about leaving without a word to the two people who’ve done more to help you than anyone else in this godsforsaken world, fine. But at least let me come so that you don’t get yourself killed.”

  I’d gotten so used to struggling through life on my own that I didn’t always see the times when I needed help. Curlin’s betrayal had cut me deep, but somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, I knew that Sawny would have been right to forgive her. We didn’t know why she’d joined the Shriven, but we did know how manipulative and how utterly without conscience they could be.

  So I resolved to do as Sawny would have, had he been here, and try to forgive her. Someday.

  “Fine,” I said with a sigh. “Meet me in the stables in ten minutes. But if you breathe a word of this to Mal or Quill, I’ll skin you alive.”

  Curlin smiled and reached out to squeeze my hand. “I’ll be as silent as the grave. But on the off chance I did say something, you know you couldn’t manage it even if you caught me in a net and knocked me out first.”

  A moment later she was gone, and I was left in the middle of a room that felt more like home than any other ever had, readying myself to go to war with the one person I trusted least in the world guarding my back.

  * * *

  Sweat rolled down my back, beaded on my upper lip and trickled, stinging, into my eyes. The jungle swarmed with gnats and mosquitoes, a horde of millions bound and determined to pepper my skin with tiny, itching welts. I ducked forward over and over again, burying my face in Beetle’s thick mane to avoid being scraped off her back by one low-hanging branch after another.

  I wasn’t entirely convinced that we were still on the right path—or even on any kind of path at all—but I wasn’t about to face Curlin’s ridicule by pulling out the map she’d swiped from the Whipplestons’ study for what would probably be the tenth time since we’d left our first campsite at dawn.

  We’d crept out in the middle of the night, and despite my boiling fury at Mal and Quill and the unsteady truce Curlin and I had forged, a thrill had run through me as we rode away from the coast toward the moon-washed mountains. Now, though, away from the ocean breezes and Noona’s endless snacks and glasses of cool tea, I was having a hard time remembering why I’d been so anxious to leave.

  I twisted in my saddle to see Curlin clinging to her ancient gray mule’s sparse mane, like the plodding beast was bound to start bucking and rearing any second.

  “All right back there?”

  Through clenched teeth, Curlin said, “We could’ve walked up this mountain a cursed lot faster if you’d agreed to leave these damned beasts behind.”

  I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief and forced myself to take a deep breath. She wasn’t going to get any less irritating, and since throttling her wasn’t a real option, I would have to find a way to cope. Curlin had been one of my best friends in the world when we were children, one of my only friends, and her intense need to control every situation had been a challenge even then. Her years with the Shriven hadn’t improved her temper one bit.

  “You really think we could have carried this lot up and down these mountains, with your arm only just out of stitches? To say nothing of my Rayleane-damned shoulder.” I jerked my chin at our bedrolls and saddlebags stuffed with pilfered food, clothes and weapons. Quill’s door had been closed and the twins’ voices raised at one another when I’d snuck down the stairs and raided the kitchen on the way out to the barn. The pang of sneaking away without a goodbye hadn’t been painful enough that I was willing to leave empty-handed, and there was no way in all of Hamil’s tumultuous seas that we would’ve been able to carry all of it.

  Curlin’s lips tightened, and the tattoos over her cheekbones glistened with what could have been either sweat or tears. It was hard to tell. If I had to put money on it, I’d guess sweat. Details of the Shriven’s training were a well-guarded secret, but one so closely held that even as a wee thing, I’d known that the worst I could imagine didn’t come close to the horrors of the truth. More than a few brats who’d grown up in the temple with me, dimmy and twin alike, had been recruited by the Shriven over the years.

  And once they’d gone for training, they, like Curlin, had become almost entirely unrecognizable.

  The Shriven moved with the languid, dangerous grace and speed of predators. I’d heard folks say that one of the Shriven could be across the room in a second, and by the time the clock had moved on to the next, they’d have cut your throat and disappeared, and not a person in the room the wiser. Not, at least, until you fell to the floor in a puddle of your own blood.

  The only thing on the planet more dangerous than one of the Shriven, they’d say, was a dimmy. That word still rankled me. Even after learning about the temple’s awful experiments with the philomena extract, even after finding Bo...the word still sent me into a tailspin.

  Dimmy. Diminished.

  I’d lived my whole life with that word hanging over my head. And even though I knew it didn’t define me—didn’t define anyone, really—it still wrapped around my neck like a vine, threatening to choke all the life out of me.

  If I had my way, not another soul would be manipulated by the Suzerain and their temple lackeys the way I had been. If I had my way, no one else would be controlled or fall victim to the violent grief that was supposedly the burden of the diminished.

  The path widened, and I reined Beetle in, waiting for Curlin to catch up. Our mounts walked docilely together, Curlin’s doing its best to pull the reins out of her grip in order to graze at the long grass that lined the path. Beetle, thankfully, seemed somehow aware of my tender shoulder and continued to march stoically along.

  I rolled the question that’d been plaguing me for weeks around in my head, looking for a way to shape it that wouldn’t get Curlin’s hackles up. It didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t Curlin who’d positioned herself on the defensive—it was me. She’d gone out of her way to help me, to keep me safe, and I’d met her with barbs and shields because I couldn’t wrap my head around the one decision she’d made that’d shattered me so many years ago. I’d never understood why she’d joined the Shriven. And I still wasn’t brave enough to ask.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bo

  “I feel as though I am a hen living in a den of foxes. I need to find my claws if I am to survive the machinations and scheming that are the bread and butter of this court. Be grateful that your only foes are the Shriven. At least they are straightforward in their attacks.”

  —from Bo to Vi

  When the passage door was fully closed behind Swinton, Runa swung the enormous doors of the council chamber open. I watched her, studying the subtle change in her expression as the council members filed into the room. Each of them stopped before her, bowing to kiss the gold cuff she wore around her wrist, almost identical to my own.

  A servant pulled out the throne at the foot of the table, and I took my seat. The members of the council whispered among themselves, largely ignoring me, apart from the occasional glance. My distant cousins Patrise and Lisette were the last two to swan into the room, and as soon as they’d observed the proper niceties with Runa, they were at my side, petting and praising me.

  “Oh, darling, you’ve grown into a proper young man, haven’t you?” Lisette crooned. “I am so very sorry for the loss of your mother and cousins. It’s just devastating, isn’t it? You do know that Patrise and I are here for you, yes?”

  Patrise ruffled my hair, but his reassuring grin didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course we are, cousin. We both know how difficult it is to be singleborn, but you mustn’t think of yourself as being all alone. Lisette and I are
here to guide you.”

  I gritted my teeth and gave them a tight smile. “Thank you, cousins. I’ll certainly keep that in mind.”

  The queen’s voice cut through the noise of the room. “I will now call this meeting of the council to order. Please take your seats.” To my chagrin, Lisette and Patrise chose the chairs on either side of me.

  As soon as the creaking of the old wooden chairs settled, silence fell over the chamber, and the queen began the story we’d rehearsed. It was, in its essence, the truth of what I’d learned while in Ilor, but we’d removed Vi from the narrative, shaping her pieces of the story so that they might’ve come from my perspective rather than hers.

  I listened intently, my nerves frayed and my stomach sour from too much kaffe and not nearly enough to eat, as she told them about the philomena farms, the tincture the temple used to make the diminished lose themselves to grief and the horrifying neglect and mistreatment of the laborers in Ilor. She outlined everything Vi and I had learned in our short time in the colony.

  I shifted on my throne at the foot of the table, the chill of the stone chamber creeping into the soles of my feet, in spite of the thick boots and wool socks I wore. I wanted desperately to stick my hands beneath my thighs to warm them, but I kept them clasped on the table in front of me.

  I had to appear strong, focused, unflappable. I had to take up space, to have a true presence here.

  When Runa finished, the only sounds in the room were the crackling logs in the hearths and the wheeze of Dame Turshaw’s breath. I looked from face to shocked, calculating face, searching for some sign that the council members believed what the queen had told them. Of the six members of the council, there were only three I knew beyond their reputations and years of formal interactions at court: Patrise, Lisette and Rylain, the singleborn, who were more or less in my generation, though I was by far the youngest of the group.

  It’d taken some getting used to for me to stop counting myself among them. Among the singleborn. Until I’d learned about Vi, my sister, my twin, I’d thought of them as the three other singleborn of my generation. I must, in their minds, still be neatly filed away in that category, as well. Each time I considered what would inevitably happen when they—and the rest of the empire—learned that I was a twin, the thought tightened like a noose around my neck. I knew we couldn’t hide the truth forever, but I always felt like I was betraying Vi by wishing for more time.

  Lisette yawned, breaking the silence. “Please don’t tell me that you believe the little fool. I was there not five years ago, and I saw nothing of the sort then.”

  I tried not to glare at Lisette. She, like the other singleborn, had an innate ability to command the attention of a room without moving a muscle. She was in her early thirties and wore her mass of auburn hair loose over her shoulders. Her heavy-lidded brown eyes glittered like agate chips over her high cheekbones and bow of a mouth. Just before she spoke, her mouth had twitched into something more akin to a snarl than a smile as she exchanged an incomprehensible look with Patrise.

  Patrise was talking before Lisette’s words had settled in our ears. “Honestly, Runa. You called us all here to talk about this boy’s nonsense? I’m surprised at you. You know, just as we all do, that he’s been wild with grief since the deaths of his mother and cousins. Surely he snatched this whole ridiculous story line from one of his novels.”

  Runa scowled as she saw the irritation I betrayed on my face. “Patrise, you will address me by my proper title, or you’ll spend a week locked in a cell with nothing but bread and water. I don’t give two shits rubbed together whether you believe the information Ambrose provided or not. I’ve seen the evidence, and I believe him. As the monarch of this country, my judgment trumps yours. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” he muttered.

  Patrise and Lisette were hardly ever apart, so close they were almost a matched pair. More siblings than cousins. Patrise was one of those unnervingly handsome men who, unlike me, never allowed his face to betray his emotions. He and Lisette had always been on the periphery of my life, alternately scheming against me and doing their best to spoil me rotten in hopes of garnering the queen’s favor. Patrise had tried more than once to have me killed, and I was sure that, at the very least, Lisette hadn’t been ignorant of those plans. She may have even had a hand in orchestrating them.

  But the two of them had also seen to it that the presents they sent for my birthday were more extravagant by half than anything else I was given. They’d planted spies in my household. Spies who, in addition to the work of learning all of my habits and watching my every move, had ferried lascivious gossip to my cousins Claes and Penelope, which they’d then used as blackmail on my behalf. Or at least they had, until their untimely deaths. Despite Claes’s betrayal of me on his deathbed, I dearly missed them both.

  The others around the table shifted and murmured among themselves, beginning to process what the queen had told them. The other members of the council were also singleborn, representing the handful of families that had borne singleborn children since the founding of Alskad. Each of the people around the table was, by some complicated means or another, related to each other. We could all trace our lineage back to the first empress of Alskad and her singleborn children.

  A clear contralto voice cut over the rising tide of the council’s worrying. Rylain. “Your Majesty, if I may ask—why have you brought this matter to our attention?”

  My relationship with Patrise and Lisette was much more complicated than what existed between Rylain, the eldest singleborn of our generation, and me. Rylain had always done her best to separate herself from the council and the other singleborn. Her estates were even farther north than mine, at the very edge of the border between Alskad and the Arctic waste. Refusing to engage in the backstabbing complexities of court life, Rylain only came to Penby when a direct order from the queen required the trip, and she had always been vocal about her lack of interest in the politics of the empire or the throne.

  Needless to say, of all my singleborn cousins, I felt the most kinship with Rylain. Unlike Patrise and Lisette, she was never a threat to my ascension, and any time I tired of the endless politicking of the other singleborn, she was always there, ready with a conversation that had nothing to do with the machinations of court life.

  The council’s voices rose again, echoing Rylain’s question and calling out more queries in increasingly shrill tones. Rylain never schemed or postured like the others—she quietly observed, just as she did now. With wide-set brown eyes so dark as to be almost black, she studied each face in the room, watching the slight changes in their expression and cataloging them as she would the books in her library.

  After a few minutes of this, the queen stood and slammed her hands down on the wooden table with a loud bang.

  “Quiet!” she roared.

  Rylain’s eyes met mine, holding my gaze for just a moment before turning her intent stare on Dame Turshaw, who was seated on the queen’s left. The ancient woman’s deeply wrinkled forehead creased as her eyebrows knit together in a furious expression, and she tossed an imperious glare at the queen.

  “Your Majesty, Rylain asked you a question,” she said. “And a good one, at that. You’ve obviously gathered us here for a reason. Without the evidence you claim to have received from the crown prince—” she spit the word like a foul bit of spoiled fruit “—and with no clear purpose, all you’ve done here is defame and defile the good name of our temple and the Suzerain.”

  I cleared my throat. “Your Majesty, if I may—”

  “Son, you are here as a courtesy and a courtesy alone,” Dame Turshaw snapped. “Despite your status as heir, you’ve not yet been given a place on this council, in part because of your ill-advised and unapproved trip to Ilor. A trip, I might add, that is the entire cause of this disruptive and inconvenient meeting. You’ve no right to speak.”

  Liset
te nodded at Dame Turshaw. “You make a good point. Without membership on the royal council, the crown prince is present as a guest and is without a vote. Therefore, I move that Crown Prince Ambrose be voted onto this council.”

  “If we allow him to join the council, our number will be seven. It’s against our bylaws for the table to exceed six,” Olivar, a rotund man in his late middle age, countered. “Someone will have to step down.”

  My jaw tensed. I knew the bylaws. Runa and I had discussed the issue at length, and who should be asked to step down. In my ideal world, it would be Patrise or Lisette—ridding myself of those awful, conniving power-grubbers would please me to no end—but such a choice wouldn’t be wise. Better to keep danger in plain sight than shove it off to the side where it might fester and grow into something nastier.

  “I second the nomination of the prince to the council,” Patrise said, his eyes holding mine in a long stare. He surely thought that this move would buy him my favor, or at least a bargaining chip at some point in the not-too-distant future. I wondered if he had any idea how much I loathed him.

  Lisette rolled her eyes so dramatically that no one at the table could have missed it, and then raised her hand. “A third nomination carries it. Your Majesty, will you consider calling to vote the nomination of Crown Prince Ambrose Oswin Trousillion Gyllen to the royal council?”

  “We must first discuss the implications of such a decision.” The queen nodded. “Prince Ambrose, please adjourn to the antechamber while the council goes into private session.”

  I rose and left the room, feeling the pressure of the council’s eyes on me as I departed.