by Jenna Glass
“And be careful of Zarsha, too,” Graesan finished. “He may not be the monster I allowed Tamzin to convince me he was, but his motives are not pure, either.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise.” And she meant it. As fond as she had become of Zarsha, he was still something of an enigma. He had all but admitted to being a spy, but she wasn’t sure why a spy would be trying to marry the queen of the kingdom he had infiltrated. And she had a feeling he understood her far better than she understood him. “I have a lot of questions to ask him when we next have some time.”
“Good.” He bowed his head. “I should go. Waiting isn’t going to make this any easier.”
He still had hold of her hands, and neither of them seemed inclined to let go. Ellin’s throat was aching again, and she swallowed past the lump that was quickly forming there.
“Tell Zarsha I command him to heal whatever it is that’s still wrong with you before setting out.”
Graesan let go of her hands and rubbed his ribs gingerly as one corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “It’s just some bruises. When he stops finding it entertaining to poke them and make me wince, they’ll hardly bother me at all.”
She snorted. “He can afford a pot of salve.”
“I’ll pass on your request.”
If Ellin truly wanted to be sure Graesan’s ribs were healed before setting out, she would have to make the request herself. She doubted Graesan had any intention of asking Zarsha for anything—even if Zarsha were likely to grant that request. But if Graesan was too proud or stubborn to fix the bruises—he could afford a pot of salve on his own with what she’d been paying him as her secretary—then that was his problem.
Fighting yet again against tears, she watched as with one last yearning glance, he turned around and walked down the hallway after Zarsha.
* * *
—
Delnamal woke to feel a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. He blinked groggily, his body trying to drag him back into sleep, for he could feel in his bones that it was still the middle of the night. He reached up to rub his eyes, finding them gritty, then blinked to see his mother bending over his bed, a small luminant cupped in one hand.
Delnamal blinked again and sat up, stifling a yawn as his sluggish mind took in the sheen in his mother’s eyes. He shook his head rather violently in an effort to wake up faster as his pulse suddenly kicked up and alarm prickled through him.
“What is it?” he cried. “What has happened?”
“The king has taken a turn for the worse,” his mother said, then dashed away a tear that slid down her cheek. “The healer says—” She made a sound between a hiccup and a sob.
“What?” Delnamal yelled, dread making his voice come out sharper than he intended. “What does the healer say?” He threw back the covers and slid out of bed, grabbing for his dressing gown, for of course he already had a good idea what the healer said, based on his mother awakening him in the middle of the night.
“He’s not expected to last the night,” the queen said, then threw her arms around him and wept against his shoulder.
Delnamal had never known what to do with women’s tears, and he was especially flummoxed by his mother’s. Still, he put his arms around her and patted her back gently while inside, he tried to make sense of the wild swirl of emotions within him. To his shame, his own eyes burned with the hint of incipient tears.
“The potion,” he said, blinking fiercely in an effort to keep his eyes dry. “Did he drink it?”
The healing potion had arrived from the Abbey—Delnamal refused to think of the place as Women’s Well, no matter what delusions of grandeur had moved its inhabitants to so name it—earlier this evening, but the king had been asleep, and both Delnamal and the queen had thought it imprudent to wake him.
His mother shook her head, then pushed away from him, dabbing at her eyes. “I decided to wake him when I retired for the evening, but he would not rouse. That was when I summoned the healer.”
Delnamal’s gut clenched. They should have awakened the king the moment the healing potion arrived. Then his throat tightened as it occurred to him that what they really should have done was to send to the Abbey for a potion the moment they realized the illness was more than a head cold. And that the reason they hadn’t was that he himself had put doubt into his father’s mind about the safety of those potions.
If the king died this night, it might very well be Delnamal’s fault. Something akin to panic swelled in his breast.
“We must get him to drink that potion.”
The queen shook her head. “The healer says it is too late.”
“Fuck the healer!” Delnamal bellowed, causing his mother to flinch away from him. He drew in a deep breath and tried to calm his temper. “He will drink the potion,” he said in a steadier voice, “and he will get well again.”
With his mother trailing along behind him, Delnamal marched to the king’s bedchamber. “We should wake Shelvon,” she said, clearly meaning that Delnamal should wake his wife.
“No need,” he bit out. “We will not need a bedside vigil, for Father is not going to die tonight.”
He continued through the halls, heedless of his mother’s protestations. He burst into the king’s bedroom unannounced, to find the healer, his apprentice, and a plethora of servants and honor guardsmen standing around the bed, looking grave and frightened.
“Everybody out!” he commanded.
There was no question that half the men in the room wanted to argue with him, but one look at his face was all it took to strike them silent. The healer tried to stay behind, but he hurried to follow the others when Delnamal glared at him.
The bed curtains had been tied back, giving Delnamal an unimpeded view of his father, who lay on his back in the center of the bed. The king’s hair had been neatly brushed, though it was greasy and lank from lack of washing, and his beard had been trimmed for the first time since he had fallen ill only a little more than a week ago. The sheets had been pulled up to his chin, and Delnamal knew he had been groomed and positioned so as to retain what dignity he could during his final hours, when his household would stand vigil by his bedside. Delnamal snarled at the large bouquet of fragrant flowers that had been placed near the bed to help cover the stink of the sickroom.
“Get those out of here,” he ordered his mother, and his mood was so fierce she leapt to obey.
The vial of potion that had arrived from the Abbey today sat forgotten on a bedside table. Delnamal snatched it up and sat on the bed beside his father. If it weren’t for the painful, labored sound of his breathing, Delnamal might have thought him already dead. He put his hand on his father’s bony shoulder and gave it a shake.
“Please, Father,” he begged. “Wake up. You must take this potion.”
There was no sign that the king was aware of him. Delnamal shook him a little harder, feeling his already fragile self-control fraying at an alarming rate.
“You must!” he demanded. “This cannot be my fault!”
This last came out on what sounded suspiciously like a sob to his own ears. He had thought only of his father’s well-being when he had urged him not to send for a potion. How could he trust the king’s health to those witches at the Abbey? Especially after they’d sent that flier to Melcor. If he’d had any idea his father was this ill…
Shaking had failed to awaken the king, so Delnamal tried slapping his face.
“Stop that!” his mother cried, reaching out to him, but he batted her hand away hard enough that she yelped.
He hadn’t the energy to apologize, his focus entirely on his father’s unearthly stillness. He had to admit to himself that the king was not going to wake up, no matter what he did. But he was not about to give up.
Delnamal pulled the stopper from the vial. “Hold his head up,” he growled at his mother. She was too shaken by
his ferocity to refuse, slipping one hand behind her husband’s head and tilting it upward. Delnamal forced the king’s mouth open and tipped the vial until a few drops of potion hit his tongue. The king’s tongue made a sluggish attempt to move, but most of the potion trickled out the corner of his mouth, and there was no sign of swallowing.
Delnamal’s hands were visibly shaking as he poured a little more potion, then attempted to hold the king’s mouth closed so it couldn’t escape. He then rubbed on the king’s throat, as he might do for one of his dogs when inducing the beast to swallow a potion. The king’s throat spasmed, but instead of swallowing, he coughed weakly, the potion bubbling out past his closed lips. Delnamal went to try again, only to find that the vial was now empty, most of the potion soaked up by the bedclothes. He let the queen gently take the vial from his fingers and set it aside.
“I’m not ready to be king yet,” he whispered, hardly believing what was happening.
“Few kings are when they ascend the throne,” his mother said, stroking the king’s hair. She readjusted the bedclothes, heedless of the tears that stained her cheeks.
“I should have made him order the potion sooner,” he said, expecting his mother to give him soothing reassurances that there was nothing he could have done. Instead, the look on her face hardened, and her eyes glinted with anger.
“Yes, you should have. And he should have. But it is the perpetual hubris of men to believe they are immortal. You are both to blame for this needless loss.”
Delnamal recoiled from his mother’s anger and pain. His immediate instinct was to defend himself, to reiterate his argument that the potions of the Abbey could not be trusted. But it was clear she was not open to hearing his point of view, and Delnamal couldn’t help wondering…
Was there some part of him that had wanted this to happen? That had chafed at the king’s insistence on protecting his bastard children and the traitorous women of the Abbey?
But no. Of course not.
Sunk in his own misery, Delnamal did not notice the moment when his father’s labored breathing slowed, and then stopped.
Part Three
SOVEREIGN
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alys chewed her lip nervously as she placed the two paired fliers on the table in front of her.
“It will work this time,” Chanlix assured her, her eyes alight with excitement.
“I hope you’re right,” Alys said as she opened her Mindseye and grabbed a mote of Rho. They’d been working on this spell for what felt like forever, Chanlix crafting the fliers with surprisingly skilled hands, and Alys and Tynthanal providing the needed combination of masculine and feminine elements. They were close, so close…
The visit from the tax collector heightened the pressure, driving home the reality that there was only so long Women’s Well could go on as it was, operating in something very like autonomy. Alys no longer spent such a great proportion of her day trying to create a spell to fake a pregnancy and was instead spending most of her time helping invent new and powerful spells using the unique combination of elements available in Women’s Well, as well as using masculine and feminine elements together. Tynthanal was her only blood family here, but in a way the whole town was beginning to feel like family as she spent so many hours working with them side by side. She desperately wanted to protect Jinnell, but she wanted to protect her brother and the townsfolk almost as much.
The fliers that she and Chanlix and Tynthanal had developed might very well be just the tool they needed to make the town of Women’s Well indispensable to the Crown. Nowhere else was Zal plentiful enough to produce this particular spell—and even if the spell crafters of the Academy in Aaltah had access to Zal, they would be horrified and offended at the thought of combining their own magic with feminine elements. If this spell worked, then the town of Women’s Well might no longer need to keep its successes secret.
Alys placed a mote of Rho into each of the fliers. One remained inert, while the other sprang to life. She trapped the active one with her hand, closing her Mindseye. “You belong to Tynthanal Rai-Brynna,” she told the flier, speaking slowly and clearly to set its target. Then she released it.
Alys and Chanlix watched as the flier took wing and darted out the open window of Alys’s house. Their hands met and clasped tensely together as they both stared at the remaining flier. And waited.
Alys imagined the flier she had sent speeding through the air, crossing the distance between her house and Tynthanal’s in little more than a minute, then flying through the window he had left open for it. She silently counted the seconds. Tynthanal would be waiting as anxiously as she. Once the flier arrived, he would feed it the rest of the Rho it needed to activate the second spell, and then…
Alys hadn’t realized she’d closed her eyes until she heard the soft chirp. She opened her eyes and saw that the flier on the table was now standing upright. Chanlix fed it some more Rho. And in front of the flier, transparent but clearly visible, a small image of Tynthanal appeared. He was sitting at his own kitchen table, his face split with a grin and his eyes alight.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
Both Alys and Chanlix cried out in pleasure, impulsively hugging each other.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tynthanal said.
“Yes!” Chanlix agreed. “It’s a yes!”
Alys’s throat was too tight to answer. She was happy for the success of the spell and all the implications it had for the future of Women’s Well, but she was even happier to know that soon she could see her children for the first time in almost three months. They exchanged letters by flier often, Jinnell supplying a constant stream of reassurances that all was well at home. But something in the last couple of letters had felt different, though Alys couldn’t put her finger on it. She’d shown the most recent letter to Tynthanal, and he hadn’t sensed anything off about it, so maybe she was imagining things. But she couldn’t help feeling that Jinnell was beginning to worry about her extended absence. She’d told Alys she was visiting with her grandfather on a semi-regular basis, and Alys wondered if the king was beginning to drop more aggressive hints that a marriage with Prince Waldmir was in her future.
Alys should have headed home at least a month ago, when her hopes of finding a way to help Shelvon conceive or fake a pregnancy had all but died. There was little she could do at home to protect Jinnell if the king decided she should marry Prince Waldmir. But if nothing else, she could offer her daughter love and comfort—and they could formulate a plan to sneak her out of the kingdom under a false identity if it came to that. Alys would love to remain in Women’s Well to continue her magical education, but this special flier was just the kind of breakthrough that would finally offer the town and its people protection. Which meant she could—and should—go home to her children.
Which, of course, she wanted to do quite desperately, for she had never been away from them this long before. She just wished she could return to them triumphantly with an arsenal of magic that would protect Jinnell from Delnamal’s malice.
Chanlix and Tynthanal chattered away as Alys lost herself in thought, but her mind snapped back to attention when she heard both of them gasp with what sounded like dismay. She looked at the image of her brother and saw that a second flier was now sitting on the table before him. Her heart thudded against her breastbone as she took in the raven-black flier, which was holding a white parchment scroll sealed with black wax.
Only death announcements were sealed with black wax.
Alys met her brother’s eyes and saw the same sick knowledge in his expression. He had no wife, no children, no mother. The only people in his life for whom he might receive a death announcement via flier were Alys, Delnamal, and the king.
Alys had never had much use for religion, but nonetheless she prayed silently to the Mother that the death being announced was Delnamal’s. It wasn’t that uncommon
for young men in their prime to drop dead. Her husband, after all, had died well before his time, though he’d been far older than Delnamal was now.
Tynthanal removed the scroll from the flier’s claws, breaking the seal and opening it. He read the message, and the look on his face said it all.
King Aaltyn was dead.
And that meant Delnamal was now the rightful King of Aaltah.
* * *
—
You are not going to cry, Jinnell told herself sternly as she wandered through the rooms of the manor house, ensuring that everything was in order. In each room, the furniture was draped to protect it from dust, and the curtains were drawn. Bedding had been packed away in storage trunks, and valuables moved to locked cabinets and cupboards. All but two of the household staff—some of whom had worked for her father’s family since he was a little boy—had been told their services were no longer required. Jinnell couldn’t imagine how the housekeeper and the steward alone could keep the place clean and in good repair, but there was nothing she could do about it. The king had spoken, and Jinnell had no choice but to obey.
Footsteps echoed loudly in the empty house, and Jinnell turned to see Falcor entering the once-cozy parlor where her inspection tour had petered out. He looked at her with undisguised sympathy, as if he knew exactly how she was feeling. Which perhaps he did. A master of the guard was meant to be distant and dispassionate, but she did not think Falcor’s dedication to her family’s safety was entirely a product of his sense of duty. He cared, and he had to know that her uncle’s decree that she and Corlin should be his guests at the palace while her mother was away was not the act of kindness it might appear on the surface.