She imagined Remi’s arms tight around her, holding her close as he did so often. Despite what they had done to each other in the past, and the fear he held for her safety, it was only love and acceptance she felt from him. There had always been something comfortable between them—from that first time when she had been lost, sunburned on a cot in a prison cell, and he had held her as though it was the only thing to do; to when she had wanted to die, allowing the rot to take her body, and he had pressed himself against her in the night, willing her to live.
She smiled at the idea, running her hand across her stomach. She had been so sure she would never be able to have a child of her own. And now she had one turning her world upside down. She could only hope this little heir of the Empire would have an empire left to rule over.
She blew out a soft breath. She could feel the sun shining through the doorway of the large room, despite her closed eyes. She just needed rest, and she would be able to better control her emotions.
Just as she started to drift, she thought she felt something else, a stab of anger and curiosity, and then nothing.
Lis dreamed of Remi. He was leaning over her, his hair loose about his face, his smile relaxed, his shoulders bare, fire dancing behind his eyes. He burned, the flames dancing over his skin. She waited for the phoenix to show itself, but it didn’t. He burned hotter, and then the world around them burned. He cried out for her, but there was nothing she could do. His skin bubbled and split, and he screamed.
Lis sat up quickly, her throat dry as though she had screamed with him, his slow death still too vivid in her mind. It was dark, and she wondered how long she had slept. The ground was hard beneath her, and she ran her hand over the rough wood. When the sound of water sloshed against it, she wished for the gift of fire. Above her, slim slits of light marked out the boards above her. Footsteps moved back and forth as the wood creaked, but there were no voices. She reached out, but she couldn’t sense how many were on the boat with her, and she couldn’t feel any emotions either.
She put her hand to her head. It ached as though she had been hit, but there were no bumps or cuts that she could find. She wondered how long until she learnt who had taken her and what they wanted.
Chapter 23
Remi tried to maintain his calm and keep the fire at bay. The conversation with his parents had gone around in circles. The emperor was clearly worried for what might happen next, and although Remi reassured him, he had the same fear.
‘What do you propose we do next?’ he asked the emperor.
‘You have formed some allies, allowed the people to see who you are and what you are prepared to do for your Empire. I think it worthwhile that you attempt to continue your tour. Start with Fifth and try a different route to Fourth. Other islands were willing to greet you. I wonder why they were so keen to attack.’
‘It may be that they feared what he was,’ Advisor Gan said quietly.
The emperor drew in a breath, but Remi stepped forward. ‘He is right,’ he said, ‘and the princess was not herself.’
‘Ensure she knows how to behave and head back out tomorrow,’ the emperor said.
‘She knows full well how to behave,’ the empress said before Remi could leap to her defence. ‘There must have been something particular for her to act that way.’
Remi glanced at the advisor. He wasn’t ready to announce the child to his parents yet. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant, nor what it could mean for Lis going forward, and he would rather she had the time to come to terms with it before his mother started fussing. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t let Lis leave the island again if they knew the truth.
‘What of the phoenix?’ his father asked. ‘How did they react to that?’
‘We didn’t get the chance to use it.’
Advisor Gan gave him a sideways glance. Remi waited, but the man said nothing. Was he on their side, or was he saving up the knowledge to use against them at a later date?
‘General Long?’ the emperor asked. ‘How is my old friend?’
‘Not what he was,’ Remi admitted. ‘I think with some time, he will be himself again.’
The emperor nodded.
The small group bowed and left the throne room. As soon as they hit the sunshine, Remi noticed two of Lis’s guards walking by the bottom of the steps. He hadn’t sent anyone with her, since she was always so sure she could look after herself, but a guard had walked with her back to the laundry.
‘Is someone watching over her?’ he called after them, and they looked back at him with some confusion. Remi took the stairs two at a time to reach them.
‘The princess is with you,’ one of them said, looking around Remi and up the steps.
‘We left her with you,’ the other one said.
‘She can be somewhat persuasive,’ Remi admitted. ‘She headed back to the laundry, but a guard followed.’
They glanced at each other before bowing as one, then followed him towards the laundry. He looked about the silent streets, wondering if the city would ever be what it had been before. Not that it had been as active as he’d heard it had been before the war. Fear had driven them away, fear of being caught or suspected of magic, and fear of the magics themselves. Remi had done nothing of late to help that, only to make it worse.
It was then that he realised the advisor had not joined them. The soldiers ahead of him broke into a run, and he rounded the corner to find Yang sprawled in the dirt, a pot of something he had been cooking knocked over and spilled out across the ground beside him. A bloody gash marred the side of his head. General Long was similarly positioned, as though he had stepped forward and then been knocked from behind. His face in the dirt, a mat of brown crust hardening in his hair.
Remi felt instantly sick, and he wasn’t sure how he made his limbs move to stand in the doorway of the large chamber they had been sleeping in. Movement had stopped in the yard behind him.
‘Go for the general and Hui Te-Sze,’ he said, then pushed the door open.
The room was dim, even in the sunshine, and he formed a large flame in his hand. He needed to see, but he was so scared of what he might find.
The room appeared to be just as it had been, the sleeping mat spread out on the floor, the cover thrown back as though she had just stood up. The table was bare and untouched. Other than the fire marks along the walls and platform from his own loss of control, there was nothing to indicate there had been a fight. He wondered for a moment if she had willingly left with whoever had come. But he returned to the doorway and watched as a guard carefully helped Yang to sit up. She would not have willingly done anything for someone who had hurt Yang.
‘Lis,’ Yang murmured, and then he was fighting against the soldier trying to help him. ‘Where is she?’ he scrambled to his feet, but he leaned heavily on the soldier, and he stumbled as he tried to walk.
Remi stepped forward, took the man by the shoulders and lowered him back to the ground. ‘Go for a healer,’ he directed the soldier.
‘I am a healer,’ Yang said. ‘Where is she?’
Remi shook his head. ‘Gone.’
‘No, she was sleeping.’
Remi kept a hold of him to stop him from trying to get up again. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. We had broth, I checked her over, we talked a little, she went to rest. Then I was being helped out of the dirt… I should have been more careful.’
‘This isn’t your fault.’
‘She is scared,’ he said, leaning in closer to Remi. ‘She doesn’t know what this child might do to her, and she is worried.’
Remi shook his head. ‘She hasn’t been herself. If the child has magic…’
‘I don’t know that it does,’ Yang said, putting his hand to his head and flinching before looking at his hand and the blood there.
‘You said it was powerful.’
‘That might have been Lis protecting it. I couldn’t sense any magic in the child today.’
Remi nodded and looked across at
General Long. It appeared that he too had been taken unawares. He stood up quickly, releasing his hold on Yang, and he nearly fell back in the dirt. ‘Come with me,’ Remi said to a group of soldiers standing by the doorway.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I know where they were hiding,’ he said.
‘You can’t take them on yourself. Wait for the general. Wait for the hunter,’ Yang called after him.
‘It might be too late,’ he said, running from the compound as the soldiers followed behind. There were other soldiers around the Palace Isle, and he might meet up with more of them. He ran with everything he had. They couldn’t be too far ahead of him—she had only left him within the hour, he thought. His father had talked in circles for so long. Remi still wasn’t sure if the man trusted him or blamed him, but either way he was expecting Remi to fix the problems of the Empire.
They ran down the long street towards the gate he had once melted shut and pushed through it with no effort. The soldiers piled into the courtyard behind him. They waited, but there was no sign of life within the space, as though no one had used it in hundreds of years. He wondered how that could be. He stepped forward slowly. There wasn’t even the mark from where Lis had created her cage of flowers to get his attention on the wall. He looked up but saw nothing.
He raced through the black gate, his heart pounding. It looked just as it had that first night, the dust and cobwebs heavy. There was no one in the dormitory where he had spent long recovering from his fight with Lis. The water in the pond looked just as black, and the cobwebs around the gazebo nearly stopped him entering.
He pushed open the door to the room with the faces, but there was nothing there. He pushed open the next and the next, and again they looked as they had when he had first found them. He stepped inside the room, and the image of Lis smiled down on him. He was sure it looked different, as though angled differently from when he had first found it.
What had happened to his world? It wasn’t anything like he had thought it was. Although he had loved her from the moment he had seen her, there was a time when he would have killed Lis. Fearing what she was and what she might do to him. What she had done to him. And now they were more closely linked than ever before, but he had no idea where she was.
‘Could the child be Hidden?’
‘Sire?’ a soldier asked at the door.
‘Is that why Yang could sense magic and then not?’
‘Healer Yang is Hidden; he can sense them.’
Remi nodded acknowledgment. Nothing in his world made any sense at all, and it wouldn’t until he found Lis.
‘They aren’t on the island,’ Remi said.
‘The magics?’
He nodded. ‘Get on the wall and find out if any boats have recently left. Now!’ he cried, and the man bolted. He walked back along a gravel path he could barely make out amongst the weeds and past the black gate. The silver characters sparkled in the sunlight. Remi stopped and ran his hands over them.
‘The phoenix returns’ they said, and as he brushed his hand over them, they shifted beneath his fingers. ‘Save them.’
‘Gather every man you can,’ he called to the nearest soldier, ‘and get to the dock. As soon as we know where they were headed, we will be close behind.’
Chapter 24
Lis squinted into the light as she was led onto the deck of the boat. There was nothing around them but water, and despite her recent trouble with her barrier, she couldn’t seem to muster any magic at all. She blew out a soft breath and felt a tingle in her fingertips. But it was gone as soon as it had formed.
‘That won’t work,’ a voice behind her said. A familiar voice, although the hatred laced in it was something new.
‘Wu Peng,’ she said softly without turning. ‘I see that you abandoned my father as well as your wife.’
‘My wife died,’ he spat, grabbing her roughly by the arm and spinning her around, ‘and it is your fault. Filling her with magic and the like.’
‘I think you filled her with magic,’ she said. ‘You married her; you created the child growing inside her. It was the child who took her away. It had nothing to do with magic.’
He spat in her face. The action was so unexpected, she wasn’t prepared for it. She wanted to step back, but he still held her tight. She wiped her face with her sleeve. She had a sudden urge to throw up, unsure how she managed to hold it in.
‘I am a lot stronger than I was when I opened blossoms for you,’ Lis said.
‘Not now,’ another man said, and she turned to him as he reached for her. She was trapped by Peng’s strong hold. It wasn’t allowing her any chance to move away from these people. The man tapped something on her chest, and she looked down to find a bag hanging around her neck. A small cloud of spices hit her nostrils, and she sneezed.
At least she couldn’t sense their emotions, but she wondered just what they wanted from her. Looking at Peng, it was clear he wanted revenge.
‘You have fallen a long way,’ he said.
She blinked back the stinging tears caused by the cloud of spices and longed for a breeze. ‘I am the crown princess of the Empire of Rei-Een,’ Lis said.
‘I thought she was the hidden princess,’ one of the others said, and Peng hushed him.
‘You are nothing but a concubine. The prince and the royal family know you are not worth the title of princess. He has taken advantage of you, and you have let him. Pretending to push out the magics when you were fighting them together.’
‘Taken advantage?’
One of the men sniggered, and she turned on him.
‘We heard the stories of his visiting your bed. That is what princes do with concubines.’
‘He never took advantage,’ Lis said. ‘He just watched over me.’
‘He watched something,’ one of the others said, and the rest joined in the laughter.
Lis sighed. She had no idea the Empire spoke of their relationship, but then he had never done as he should when she had been hidden, and that was his own doing. She had never asked anything of him. But she was grateful all the same that they had been given the chance to get to know each other. If she hadn’t, she might not have realised how much she cared for him and had needed to return to him, and the Empire might have been lost.
‘Whatever you may think, we are wed now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said the man who had laughed.
‘I was presented to the people. We have been touring.’ She hoped she didn’t sound as desperate as she thought she did.
‘It is a ploy. I wonder that the emperor would have allowed a son of his to live with magic, but then it may be that the emperor has no choice.’
‘The emperor may be dead,’ another said.
‘It would be easy enough for you to see for yourself,’ she said.
‘The Palace Isle is crawling with magics; it isn’t somewhere anyone in the empire wishes to visit.’
It had been abandoned since the fighting, and Lis realised that no one was returning. The ministers had more or less been saying the same thing as these men.
‘We want the world to be as it was,’ she said.
‘It can’t be,’ Peng snapped.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, looking out across the water. A ship this big would be seen, and they didn’t seem to worry that she was visible to anyone else, although there were no other boats around. She wondered how long it would be until Remi realised she had been taken. The ocean was a large expanse; the Empire was just a small part of the world in the middle of it. They could be anywhere, and it could take weeks or more for Remi to discover where she was.
She pulled at the bag around her neck, but it had been stitched into her clothes. And the more she tugged at it, the more the spicy dust filled her nose. She gave up and let it go. She tried to will her clothes to change, but they wouldn’t. She spun slowly on the spot, and again nothing happened.
Several of the men around her started to laugh. She tried to push out with her
barrier, but there was nothing—no protection, no magic. She balled her hands into fists to stop them reaching for her stomach. The last thing she needed was for these men to guess that she was with child.
She looked over the railing at the churning choppy water. Perhaps the water could wash the spices from her senses. But as she leant forward, a strong hand closed around her arm again.
‘I need you,’ Peng said, his voice dark and cruel. ‘You are the best bargaining chip I have.’
‘Are you working with the magics?’ Lis asked.
‘I am negotiating,’ he said with a grin, his hand tightening its grip. ‘We will leave them alone if they leave us alone.’
‘They won’t,’ Lis said.
He pulled her closer, and she tried to lean away from him, his breath hot on her face. ‘I am in control now. I have the power to render them helpless.’
‘Where did the spices come from?’ she asked.
‘You can’t win,’ he snapped, pushing her away. She gripped at the railing to prevent herself from falling.
An island glistened in the distance. There was something familiar about it as they drew closer. It was small, like the one she had grown up on, only there were no flowers and no dock, and she wondered if anyone had visited it before.
Remi stared as Advisor Gan clambered up the gangway to the ship. He shook his head and kept moving. Yang and General Long had stayed behind, and as much as he had wanted to bring Wei-Song with him, he’d insisted that she stay with Yang.
‘You don’t know where you are looking,’ she had said.
And he didn’t. A boat had been seen, but it had headed straight out to sea. It could have then sailed in any direction, or it might have kept going. All Remi felt was a steady rhythm of panic. For both Lis and the child. She had been so strong, so determined to keep them safe that she had pushed everyone else away without even realising she had done so.
How then, in the name of all the gods, had they managed to take her without incident? Other than the injuries to Yang and the general—but he was sure that had just been to keep them quiet.
The Magics of Rei-Een Box Set Page 69