Bloodfire Quest (12 page)

She walked over to stand beside him. She was small, but it always seemed she was the larger and stronger of the two when he was in her presence. He had never felt that way with Drust Chazhul.

“I want to know the moment any of the Druids return or are sighted in any part of the Four Lands. I want to find them and I want to track them. Send more of my birds to search them out. Send word to my creature in Arborlon. I want to know what is going on. All of it.”

“I will see that it is done, Mistress.” He paused. “Do you wish to have Paranor occupied now? Perhaps the protective wards have been removed.”

She reached out and stroked his cheek gently. Then she sat down across from him. “Do you know why I wanted Drust Chazhul dead? Not because he was Prime Minister when I should have been. Nor because he was any real threat to my ambitions—certainly no more than Arodian was. I could have killed them anytime and gotten what I wanted. No, it was because Drust was so determined to put an end to the use of magic in the Four Lands.”

She got up again, crossed the room, poured wine into goblets, and returned, handing one to him. She smiled as he hesitated in accepting. “It is only wine, Stoon.”

He took it from her, and she sat. “Drust believed that magic had run its course and that once again science had become a viable alternative. He ignored history and common sense, believing that the advent of the Great Wars and the destruction of the Old World were things of the past and that the future should not be shaped by what had happened several thousand years ago. The discovery of diapson crystals and the inventions that were generated as a result led him to embrace this theory. Magic seemed dangerous to him. He perceived it as a threat—not only to himself because he had no use of it, but to the larger world as well, because its power rested in the hands of a few, and that could never change. Magic wasn’t an object that anyone could master and command. It was genetic and therefore elitist. It could be studied and learned or it could be acquired by chance and sometimes diligence, but never possessed by more than a few.”

“He hated magic’s unpredictability, as well,” Stoon added. He sipped at his wine and found it satisfactory. “He didn’t trust it.”

“He didn’t understand it. He preferred science because it could be contained and manipulated by everyone who had access to it. He could see its source; he could hold it in his hands. This isn’t so with magic, which is ephemeral and intuitive—even when you hold a talisman. In any case, he was determined to stamp it out, in spite of what he suggested to me in our final meeting. He thought to placate me and later would have betrayed me. Had he been allowed, he would have advanced science to the position it occupied in the world before the advent of the Great Wars. He would have relegated magic to the pages of ancient history.”

She shook her head. “Magic is the foundation of the Orle family and the source of what keeps the Four Lands in balance, whatever anyone else might say or think. Men and women like Drust Chazhul would manipulate and deceive their way to power that is beyond them. They would gain their positions and then squander their opportunities. When Drust became Prime Minister, all he could think to do was to strengthen his hold on his office. He gave no thought to how he might use the chance he had been given productively. He simply decided magic was bad and science was good, and that he would seize control of the one and stamp out the other.”

Stoon finished his wine and set the goblet on a small table at his elbow. “He was obsessed with making certain no one would challenge his grip on the Prime Minister’s office.”

She sniffed. “It was a grip he would never have been able to hold, even had he lived. But here is my point. I align more closely with the Druids of Paranor than with the politicians of Arishaig and the Federation. I am kindred to the Druid order in my history and in my worldview. They would not accept this, but it is so. We seek the same ends. What separates us is their unwillingness to use their magic to take control of the Four Lands. It isn’t that I am suggesting they need to do this to gain further power; I am suggesting they need to do more to make the Four Lands safe from predators. Once a central government is established, there are better uses to which magic could be put than in fighting the constant civil wars that have raged since the time of the First Druid Order.”

“And you would be the one to make this happen?” he asked.

“Of course. Who better? I am well positioned for it. I command the strongest government in the Four Lands. I have the means and influence to bring the others into line. As Prime Minister, acting on behalf of the whole of the Southland people, I can make anything I wish come to pass.”

“So you have a plan?”

“I have a plan. But it does not involve seizing Paranor and tearing down its walls. It does not involve engaging in a war with the Druids and eventually with the Elves, who at some point will ally themselves. It means taking a different approach.”

She did not offer to explain what that approach was, and Stoon knew better than to ask. He simply nodded in casual agreement. “So I am not to go back into Paranor?”

She rose from where she was sitting, reached out and pulled him to his feet, and then pressed herself against him. “The wards might be down, but the Druids would never leave anything valuable lying around unprotected. Try to take anything out of Paranor and you will pay a price for your arrogance. Besides, going back into Paranor at this point will undermine everything I hope to accomplish. The order will associate all that has happened so far with Drust Chazhul. I hope to leave it that way. His time has come and gone, and I will do my best to make it clear that his actions were not mine. I wish to disassociate myself—and the Federation, as well, if it is at all possible—from everything he did. Am I clear about this, Stoon?”

He felt her fingers working at the buttons of his tunic. “You could not be more clear, Mistress.”

She slid her hands inside his clothing and ran them up and down his chest. “You can stop calling me Mistress now,” she said. “Think of something a little less formal, will you?”

Then she took him to her bed.

When the assassin departed her chambers some hours later, the first rays of the sunrise were just beginning to show on the eastern horizon, the light silvery and muted. Stoon returned the same way he had come, alone and unseen, his mind on fire with memories of his time with her. Edinja was like no one he had ever been with, and he did not want their relationship to end. Even knowing that one day it would—that she would have it no other way and he would not be able to prevent it—he did not want it to happen. So he would make the most of it while it lasted, and he would not give himself cause to look back on this time with even the smallest of regrets.

For now, he had other business to attend to. He must send word to their spy in Arborlon. He must dispatch Edinja’s birds to seek out the Druid and her Elven protector. It would be their assignment to find the pair and then to track them to wherever they might be going, all the while sending messages back to him.

Messages he could carry to Edinja.

Messages of sufficient import that she would allow him to come to her and be with her as he had this night.

Stoon was a practical man with few vices and dependable instincts. But he was not perfect; he was not without weaknesses. He knew that she was one. But he also knew that for all her talk about serving a higher purpose and seeking a peaceful unification of the Four Lands, she was every bit as bloodthirsty as her former rivals. Why else had she allied herself with him? Why else had she been so keen to dispatch both Arodian and Drust Chazhul?

He slowed outside the walls of the compound, checking to make certain he had not been seen. Then he began navigating a complex network of alleyways that would take him to his quarters nearby. It was best, she had told him early on, if they were never seen together, not even by chance. It would increase his effectiveness and diminish the chances of them being connected even in the smallest of ways.

It would make their clandestine meetings just that much sweeter, she had insisted. Didn’t he agree?

Oh, yes, he agreed.

His thoughts drifted. He had come a long way since his days as the son of a blacksmith. His father had been a big, strong man with a mean temper and a penchant for taking out his anger on his son. Stoon had been badly beaten on more occasions than he cared to remember, frequently for no reason other than his father’s mood. The beatings had continued right up until the moment he took a hammer to his father’s head while he lay passed out after a bout of drinking. Then he dragged the body to the river in the dead of night and sank it with weights. A street boy after that, he had allied himself with an assassins’ guild and learned the trade well enough that eventually he was smarter and more skillful than any of them and had set out on his own.

Years of practicing his chosen trade had provided him with distance from his childhood and safety from any who might try to mistreat him ever again. It had provided him with everything that had led to his meeting with Drust Chazhul and now Edinja Orle.

His future seemed assured.

But there was a nagging concern, one that had been with him since the ill-fated assault on Paranor. Aphenglow Elessedil. He had almost caught up to her in the courtyard between the Outer and Inner walls of the Keep, but had he done so he would be as dead as Drust Chazhul. He knew that as surely as he knew he must face her again. There was a certainty to it he could not shake. She should have been his; she should have gone the way of all the others he had dispatched. Yet she had turned on him, and it was only by the slimmest of margins that he had managed to escape her. A step here, a turn there, a bit of smoke and ash, a momentary distraction—almost any of these could have changed the outcome of their meeting.

Now he would have her tracked along with the other Druids, and while he did not fear the Druids as an order or even their formidable magic, he did fear her. He could not help himself. The fear had attached itself to him and would not release its grip.

Deep within the Fangs, the new day crept like a predator from out of the eastern horizon. On the precipice where they had made their stand the previous night, Railing Ohmsford was sitting with Mirai Leah, looking out over the clusters of dead attackers to the dark and silent sweep of the forest wilderness. Nothing moved in the shadows of the jungle of rocks and trees below. No sounds broke the silence. The last attack had ended more than six hours earlier with the arrival of the Rover Austrum aboard his armored flit. The dead lay where they had fallen, and what was left of the defenders huddled together in hollow-eyed anticipation of what might happen next.

“They’ll come again,” Mirai said, as if reading his mind. She was ragged and covered in blood and dust and might have been a stranger for all that he recognized of her.

“Why did you let him kiss you like that?” he asked.

He had kept the question to himself all night, even though he could barely contain it. It ate at him in a way that was unbearable. Now it was out there, released just like that.

She gave him a look. “I didn’t have a chance to stop him. I was as surprised as you were.”

“But you didn’t even try. You let him kiss you twice.”

She started to say something and stopped. Then she looked away. “It isn’t your concern, Railing.”

“I’m your friend.”

“That doesn’t mean you have the right to question me like this. I am the one who needs to deal with Austrum, not you. Let it go.”

He did not want to let it go. He wanted to see dismay and regret from her, not acceptance. She had been forcibly violated and did not seem much concerned about it. It was maddening.

He glanced over to where the Rover was sleeping next to Skint and Seersha. The Speakman was dead; there hadn’t been time to save him once their attackers dragged him out from under the overhang. The last of the Trolls had died during the night. Farshaun, however, had recovered. He was sitting off to the other side of the sleepers, just far enough away that he couldn’t hear what they were saying.

“They won’t come again before nightfall,” Railing said, trying to regain his footing. He did not want her to be angry with him. “Whatever they are.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to bet on that. We need to get out of here before then.”

“Maybe Austrum’s right. Maybe the
Walker Boh
will find us before then.” He glanced up at the thick blanket of mist and was immediately discouraged. Nothing could find its way through that. “Or maybe he has a way to signal her. He said the flashes of magic caught his eye and guided him down to us.”

But mostly down to her, he knew. He had come for her, and it made him crazy to know that she understood it as well as he did and was doing nothing about it.

“It’s a big place,” she responded absently. “The storm blew the airship off course. Austrum took a big risk when he left to come look for us. A foolish risk. I don’t know what the others will choose to do.”

“Maybe we should send him back up there to look for them,” he suggested.

“Maybe you should stop talking about him.”

Seersha was awake now, on her feet and stretching. Her black cloak was ripped and dirty, her face a mask of harsh lines and rough determination that made her look dangerous. She walked through the dead creatures to the edge of the precipice and looked over. Mirai rose and went to join her. Railing, hampered by his leg and exhausted from the struggle, stayed where he was. It was his turn to sleep after having kept guard all night. But it was Mirai’s time, too, and he stubbornly refused to lie down until she was beside him.