By Divine Right (10 page)

Murmurs and whispered threats brought me back to myself, and I stood to see the lords and ladies of the realm staring at me, their expressions a mixture of fear and loathing.

Someone might have called my name, but I never looked back as I fled from their presence.

I hid that night in the warrens of the poor quarter, not quite afraid, but wary of placing myself where any of the Orlan family could find me. Rory accepted my token and gave me a corner where I curled myself into my cloak on the hard-packed earth and slept the dreamless sleep of the blessed. By the time I woke the sun made steep shadows against the threshold of the abandoned root cellar.

Jeb found me wandering the streets two hours after noon, his tongue rougher than a tanner’s blade. “Curse your wormy guts, Dura. The entire city watch has been looking for you since last night.” He punctuated his words with cracks from each knuckle.

“I was hiding.”

“Ha,” he snorted. “Can’t fault you there, but you’ve hidden from the king as well, and he wants to see you.” He peered at the sun. “You’ve kept him waiting for over half a day now.” He laughed. “That’s the kind of thing that usually puts him in foul humor. Or so I’m told.” He turned his back as if he expected me to follow. “I have horses at the next street.”

She stood at the main entrance to the tor without giving the appearance of waiting, but I couldn’t divine any reason for her to be there. I chided that thought for the hope and arrogance within it. Lady Gael had no further reason to speak with me.

Even so, I dismounted and came into her presence, bowing as Jeb muttered ineffective curses behind me. “How did you know it was the marquis and not the duke who’d stolen others’ gifts?”

She smiled. “I didn’t, but when I saw you talking to the juggler, you wore a look of surprise, so I waited.”

Her explanation did nothing to answer my deeper questions, questions that had nothing to do with the duke or his treasonous brother. “How did you know I carried Myle’s potion with me?”

Her eyes might have darkened a shade. “I listened to your words, master reeve. You said ‘Confession or not, the duke must die.’ I took that to mean you’d brought the poison with you.”

I found myself wondering exactly what gifts, talents, and temperaments she possessed, that she could read me so clearly.

“I owe you a debt, my lady.”

If I had expected humility or self-deprecation, I would have been disappointed.

“You do,” she nodded. She gazed at me without offering to explain her actions or motives. “The question becomes how you intend to repay it.”

Her tone hinted at possibilities that escaped me. “What can the least of Bunard’s reeves offer to one of the highborn?”

“The least of reeves can offer me nothing I want.” She smiled, and the rich hue of her eyes, startling beneath her dark lashes, held me immobile until Jeb barked my name.

Dirty and reeking from my night in the poor quarter, I came into the king’s private audience chamber. Laidir watched me from his seat on the low dais, his guards posted at the points of the compass around him, waiting for his orders. I knelt with my gaze locked to the floor. Only the six of us occupied the silence that filled his chamber.

“How did you get him to confess?” Laidir’s voice vibrated against my skin as well as my ears, deep enough so that I heard it as distinct rumbles from some mythical lute string.

I dared to raise my head and look him in the eye. “Alchemy, Your Majesty.”

Thoughts and consequences swirled behind his hazel stare. “Dangerous,” he said.

“Yes, Your Majesty, but the formula is unwritten, and the alchemist will not release it.”

“And you trust him in this?” Laidir asked.

I tried to hide my shock at the king’s question and all that it implied, but I put a hand to the floor to steady myself even so. “I do.”

“There is much to discuss,” Laidir said. For a moment his eyes grew serious, even grave. “I find myself in need of eyes and ears besides those of the castellan and his lieutenants, someone outside the tor, closer to the peoples of the city.” He paused. “Someone familiar with the cursed forest. First, tell me what you want.”

A memory of black-leaved oak trees intruded upon my vision, and I shook my head to clear it. “Your Majesty?” I shook my head in confusion.

“You’ve done a service to me and, I would like to think, the kingdom,” Laidir said. “Orlan’s rule would have been hard. What recompense do you desire, Willet Dura?”

I couldn’t help but smile. Hope, unimagined before now, flared in my chest. The denizens of the poor quarter had taught me how to bargain closely. “What are my options, Your Majesty?”

“Ha!” Laidir laughed. “Well spoken, but you will not catch me so easily. I’ve read the same parables you have. There will be no offer of half my kingdom.”

I bowed and this time I let my heart speak before my mind could stop it. “I want the hand of Lady Gael, Your Majesty.”

“Strange, considering her oaths of fealty to the Orlan family,” he said. I saw him tilt his head, and his eyes twinkled as if I’d passed some test only he knew. “Done, though your request requires more of me than you know.”

He came forward, closing the gap between us, and before I could register his intention, drew his blade and touched the flat of his sword to my lips. Then he returned to his seat, leaning forward as his eyes shone like a child’s in expectation of a present. “Now,
Lord Dura
, rise and tell me the tale!”

Keep reading for a special sample of
The Shock of Night—
book one in T
HE
D
ARKWATER
S
AGA
series by Patrick W. Carr.

Excerpt from
The Shock of
Night.

Elwin stopped at the edge of the forest, his eyes scanning the trees for any movement that might presage an attack, though the man at his right, Robin, would surely be doing the same and better than he. Still, no one living stood in a better position than he to appreciate their danger. Within the shadowed canopy of twisted black-leaved trees nothing stirred. No bird called its summer cry, no squirrel foraged the floor, no fox hunted.

Elwin almost touched the sliver of metal tucked away in his cloak, stopping just short of brushing the shiny yellow fragment of aurium as if to confirm its impossible existence.

“A blacksmith,” he muttered.

Robin turned from his inspection of the cursed forest to give him a questioning look. “Eldest?”

For a moment he considered brushing aside the invitation to explain, but Robin’s insight had proven valuable before, despite his youth. “The dead man back there was a blacksmith. Soot marked the scars of old burns on his hands and his clothes still held the smell of fire and quenching oil.” Elwin tapped his cloak pocket where the shard of metal rested, the man’s death sentence had he not already been dead. “That still doesn’t explain how he managed to survive as long as he did.”

Robin nodded. “How does a blacksmith come to be in possession of aurium?”

Elwin nodded and then shook his head. “How does anyone come to possess the forbidden metal?”

They continued riding north, their horses ascending out of the fertile valley stretching east and west that marked the border between Owmead and the northernmost kingdom on the continent, Collum. The question lay between them, unanswered, like the death of a patriarch no one dared mention, but they’d left the torn and mauled body of the blacksmith behind as a warning, according to the law of the kingdoms that bordered the Darkwater Forest.

They kept to its edge of the forest as the landscape grew rockier, defying the efforts of those who farmed it. After another mile, Robin pointed. “There. Another one,” he said in a tone of voice like the crushing of rock.

The mound of torn and matted fur, buzzing with flies in the sun, brought a surge of bile to Elwin’s throat, and he looked away to bring his stomach under control. “Check it,” he ordered in a voice that sounded hollow and strangely far away.

Tying a strip of cloth across his mouth and nose, Robin dismounted. The flies shifted at his approach—and for a moment, Elwin’s guard wore a dark halo—but no other carrion eaters defiled the carcass. The body of the sentinel, larger than a wolf by half and more heavily muscled as well, had been left untouched this close to the forest. The sentinels sparked fear even in death.

Elwin nodded to himself—animals were wise in such things. He saw Robin’s chest rise and fall in a sigh even before he turned from the body.

“Like the others,” Robin said. “It bled to death. There are cuts all over it.” He stooped to pull the lips back from the muzzle, its triangular shape a testimony to the power in the jaws. “Clean. Whoever killed it managed to do so without taking any injuries.”

With a mental wrench that rose almost to the level of physical pain, Elwin abandoned another hope. Fantasies and delusions would no longer help them. “Could you do such a thing, Robin?”

To anyone else the question might have sounded like an accusation. That Robin had never left his side since becoming his protector cast the query in a different light. His guard cocked his head, his eyes growing distant, and Elwin knew he fought the beast at his feet within his mind, playing stroke and parry before answering. “Yes,” he said finally. “But not alone.”

“Are you saying there is someone out there better than you?” Elwin asked.

Thankfully, his guard shook his head, leaving him one of his few remaining hopes. “No. Some of the wounds on the sentinel are on the back flanks and legs. I would think three or four men attacked it. I do not think any one of them to be my equal.”

He caught the slight emphasis on
think
and tried to keep the surprise from his face, but Robin had only paused.

“I wouldn’t want to come up against these men without my brothers to help. They’re certainly gifted.”

Elwin growled a curse that had nothing to do with his time in the priesthood of the Merum order. “Or something like it. That’s a half dozen sentinel deaths in the past year. We don’t have the replacements.” He tapped the sliver of aurium in his pocket and looked at the forest as if the trees might uproot themselves and attack there in the noonday sun. “Faran can’t keep up. It takes years to breed and train a sentinel.” Despair clogged Elwin’s throat, and for a moment it broke free of his ability to contain it. “I wish Cesla were here.”

Robin turned away at the mention of Elwin’s brother, unwilling, perhaps, to intrude upon the grief that still seemed so recent. “What of his gift?” he asked softly.

Elwin nodded in approval. His guard possessed a talent for knowing others in addition to his more obvious physical ones. Descending into that familiar grief wouldn’t serve them. “We follow the trail as best we can,” he sighed. “Sometimes I think we did our job too well. We’ve hidden ourselves so completely that the gift becomes difficult to find if it goes free.” He patted a pocket. “But there’s a rumor from the village of Cryos.”

“Convenient,” Robin said without explaining.

Elwin nodded. “Yes, we can visit Faran and see if there is any way he can replenish the sentinels more quickly.” The thought of the journey north wearied him. He carried too many memories, and his mind bowed beneath their weight, like a wagon axle trying to support too many bags of grain.

Elwin held out his hands to survey them in the muted sunlight that filtered through the cloud cover. The prominent veins and the skin, as thin as the papery outer layer of an onion, still surprised him. “I’m almost ready to move on, Robin. I’ve used the gift too often, and now it’s used me up.”

The sentinel lying dead at their feet brought a surge of anger, and he straightened in his saddle. “But before I go, I think I’d like to bring justice to the men who did this.”

He twitched the reins, and they rode northwest, following a trail only he could sense, deeper into the kingdom of Collum.