Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (59 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“Benet holds Tullier’s life in his hands.” She had sighed against Martin’s shoulder as she slipped back toward sleep. “The gods should reward a man who constrains his ambitions, even where he sees a clear course to their achievement.”
She woke again with a start, conscious that since Martin had left her, she had been drowsing. She rolled out of bed and fumbled for her clothes.
It was still not quite yet morning, but the place where Martin had lain had lost its heat. Stumbling over to Martin’s basin, she splashed a little water on her neck and hands and tied her hair back from her face.
Outside, the great expanse of Llara’s Kettle was a smooth mirror, reflecting the bruised purple of the predawn sky, its waters sheeted over with skeins of morning fog. The dark mountains, the great descending round of the moon—which would rise again tonight, completely full, marking the close of Andion’s month—were all there in the water, as perfect as a mirror. There was some movement in the outskirts of the camp, but here in the inner precincts mostly it was quiet. Her small tent, and Tullier’s, were staked nearby. Gaultry, lingering at the door of Martin’s tent, stiffened with alarm. She did not see the promised guards—only one man, sitting hunched in a cloak, and obviously mostly asleep, drowsing by the embers of a small fire.
There was no aura to tell her that something was wrong. Martin, she knew, would have called her, had anything been untoward when he had risen—which could have been no more than a few moments before. Nevertheless, she walked over to the single remaining guard and roused him with a less than gentle kick.
“What’s happened? Where is the guard for young Tullirius?”
The man glanced up at her, aggrieved, and rubbed the spot where her boot had hit him.
“They’re with him,” he said sulkily.
“Him? What do you mean? Tullirius is not here?” In her sudden panic, she could not help but restate the obvious.
“The Prince came for him.”
“Why didn’t you rouse me?”
The man smirked. “The boy wanted you—right up to the moment when he found you hadn’t slept in your own tent. Then, not for nothing would he have searched for you in the Stalkingman’s house.”
Gaultry could not conceal her blush. She had given little thought to Tullier last night. “Where have they gone?”
“My orders—”
Gaultry seized the soldier by the front of his shirt. “If you don’t tell me where they have gone, I will kill you, right here and now.”
He was a strong man, and he put his big hands over hers, thinking he could force her back. Unthinking, she used her power to slap him
down. His eyes went bright with fear. Gaultry, even realizing what she had done, did not back down. “Don’t waste my time,” she said. “Dawn is a time for power to blossom. Now tell me where Benet has taken young Tullirius.”
As she ran through the wet summer grass, cutting between the
ghostly shapes of the soldiers’ tents, obscured by rising trails of the predawn fog, she felt almost as though she was the only soul left living this morning, the only one alive with a sense of color and wonder and fear. Her night with Martin already seemed so far away, and yet she had brought great new strength away, great new confidence. She wondered if Martin too shared this feeling. Shared it, even as he purposefully moved, alone, among the lines of men who were armoring themselves for battle, assisting them in their preparations.
She recognized the place the soldier-guard had given as her destination: a circular, slightly raised field ringed by old, half-fallen earthwork walls. Tielmarans traditionally met there for duels of honor in any of the miscellaneous disputes that arose while the ducal armies waited in camp for call to action. There had been no such arguments since her arrival, but Gaultry had been shown the field’s location. It lay a little outside the largest grouping of the soldiers’ tents, below a guarded rise with a good view of the lake.
Leaving the main camp behind her, her approach to the field led her through a thin screen of scrub. The fog hung low on the ground here, casting mysterious, shifting shapes among the spindly trees. This area of the camp was sanctified ground—it abutted the land dedicated to the Goddess-Twins’ sacred grove, and the pair of consecrated does that lived within the grove could forage here unthreatened. With its handful of
broken trees and ragged overgrown bushes, the area had desolate aura. Gaultry, shivering from the coldness of the mist, had to remind herself that she was indeed safely within the Tielmaran lines, and there was no real chance of Lanai intruders.
She wished she knew what Benet intended with this early morning rendezvous.
Some
sort of ceremony, surely, with Andion’s Moon in its final descent, and the dawn hour ripe for ritual. Benet’s bond to the land was a mystery which Gaultry did not completely understand. Surely the Prince could not be planning to violate the pledge of protection he had made to Tullier? But what if the temptations of Kingship had proved too great, or if something in the land had risen and spoken to him? Perhaps he simply had decided his life was hostage to a deeper pledge than his word to a boy who could never really be anything other than his enemy. As she ran, Gaultry cursed herself, again and again, for ever thinking it could be the right thing to let Benet have Richielle’s
Ein Raku.
She should have hidden it, or tried to destroy it—anything that would have kept it safely out of his and Tullier’s way both, until after the passing of the moon.
The overgrown earthworks that surrounded the old dueling ground loomed up sooner than she expected. Gaultry, reaching the path that circumnavigated the field, almost stumbled over a young soldier who had been set to guard the perimeter. One of many, he was quick to inform her, his face a little white at her unexpected appearance out of the mist.
“Huntress in me, let me pass.”
“Lady, you must have a permit—”
“Elianté’s Spear!” Gaultry swore. “Don’t you know me? I am young Tullirius Caviedo’s guardian. Let me by, or the Prince and the boy together will hear my screams. By all the gods together, you will feel the fullness of their displeasure then.”
“I can’t let you through,” the soldier said pleadingly, obviously recognizing that he was beyond his league, yet unwilling to disobey his orders. “Why not petition the Captain? He’s around at the next guard post.” He pointed along the track.
“The next post?” That sounded close enough not to make any odds. Gaultry relented. “Your captain better be there as you say.” Not wasting time, she sprinted onward.
To her relief and surprise, the guard captain at the next post was Yveir. Unlike the first soldier, he recognized her, and though he frowned
at her request to enter, he reluctantly acquiesced. “But only because the Prince would have allowed you to accompany us, had you been back there in your tent when we came for him.”
Gaultry gritted her teeth. Both Benet and Tullier must have known exactly where she had spent the night. There was no good reason she could see that neither had sent a guard to retrieve her. “Benet
personally
appointed me the boy’s guardian,” she snapped. “That was not intended as merely an honor post.”
Yveir nodded toward a crooked track that led through a wide breach in the earthwork wall. A beaten earthen path, bracketed by the spindly brush that had grown up over and onto the earthworks. “Go along in that way. That’s where you’ll find them.”
Gaultry acknowledged Yveir with the goddesses’ sign, and moved tentatively forward. The ground was soft underfoot as she approached the breach, and then packed and hard as she passed through the wall and down toward the field. The brush had grown up against the interior of the wall as well as the exterior, that, combined with the fog, shielded her from a clear view of the field. Then she turned a gentle bend in the path, and the grassy round field opened before her. She drew a startled breath.
Some force of magic had cleared the fog from the dueling ground’s field. The outward-thrown mist swirled against the field’s perimeter, rebuffed, like smoke outside a bulb of glass.
What she saw within defied her expectations. Benet and Tullier, unaccompanied, stood alone on the low, daislike hummock that marked the fields’ center. Both were unfamiliarly dressed in matching grey field clothes: tunics, boots and trousers, the Prince set apart only by the silvery blue scarf he wore around his neck. Their voices were a little raised, but nothing between them was overtly aggressive. With waves of doubt assailing her, she dropped back into the masking fog.
Then Tullier turned, and she caught a glimpse of the weapon in his hand: the Kingmaker knife.
“This is a trick,” the boy said hoarsely. “And not a kind one.”
“No trick,” Benet answered. “This is what you were raised to do. A moment of destiny for us both.”
“My past is done. I seek a different future.”
“What future? The Great Thunderer has claimed you. How can you escape that?”
“I will serve Llara always,” Tullier said stoutly enough, though a boyish tremor in his voice betrayed the perplexity of his feelings. “But she
does not deny her disciples love, and I will never have that if I slay you.”
“Love?” Benet said, disbelieving. “You mean with Lady Gaultry? That cannot be. Martin Stalker has made me a formal petition for her troth. And as for the Lady—you know she has made her choice.”
“She should have her joy,” Tullier said suddenly, hotly. “I will not be your tool, to poison the things she holds dear!” Fidgeting, his fingers touched the edge of the blade. Something in the feel of the metal distracted him. “The metal,” he said, leaving aside for a moment his personal passion. “It feels alive. There is something alive moving in it!”
“Do you know what it is?” Benet said. To Gaultry, in contrast to the boy’s agitated manner, he seemed dangerously controlled, composed.
Tullier shook his head.
“Richielle’s own soul. Stripped from her body and preserved for one single purpose within this metal. Can you imagine? Only one sorcerer in this generation earned the strength to wield such magic, and to such a vile end. That sorcerer was your brother Lukas. Putting her soul into the metal to make this
Ein Raku
blade was the price she demanded, in return for vesting him with the very strength that he needed to do it.”
“Lukas Soul-breaker was only my half-brother,” Tullier corrected him. “I killed him. I will kill the goat-herder too, and all her acts, if you will let me.”
Benet, caught up in his own vision, did not heed him. “She used it to speak to me,” he said softly. “I cut my finger against it to try its power, and in that moment she spoke to me.”
Gaultry, standing at the field’s side in the mist and fog, was suddenly uncomfortably conscious that she was most probably not the only person using the mist as cover. Richielle! When had she arrived at Llara’s Kettle? More importantly—where was she now? At Gaultry’s back? At Benet’s?
At the circle’s center Benet continued talking, unaware of Gaultry’s presence. “But it would seem that Richielle’s luck has broken as a herder of men. The old witch tried to coerce me into sinking this knife in your neck as the sun rose this morning—but I stood by my crown as Prince of Tielmark and called on the Goddess-Twins to stand witness, and her witcheries lost their power, even as I prayed. My faith gave me the strength to refuse her.” Gaultry could hear the pride in his voice, even from this distance.
“Richielle is here?” Tullier glanced uneasily around, pierced by the same revelation that had just come to Gaultry. “Since when?”
“Days,” said Benet. “More than a week. She approached my Priestesses
and took over the battle-blessings the morning she arrived, but only revealed herself to me in person the night you made camp—when she attempted to suborn my pledge to protect you. Gods above, boy, hear what I am telling you! I faced her down alone, with the power of my faith!”
Something changed in the Prince as he spoke these words. There was a charge about him, an energy, that Gaultry had only before seen in him at those times when he had conducted ritual ceremonies as Tielmark’s Prince. The hair went up at the back of her neck. At these times, she unavoidably felt a sense, however elusive, of the man’s connection to Tielmark’s soil.
“Elianté and Emiera claimed me,” the Prince solemnly swore. “They gave me the strength to stand even against one so strong as Richielle. I will not be a pledge-breaker King, destroying my integrity and the land’s together in a single corrupted oath.” He paused, then reached out with a single finger for the point of the
Ein Raku.
Tullier stepped back, drawing the blade out of his reach, but not quite fast enough. The darkness that was the spot of Benet’s blood seemed to absorb into the metal.
“But at last I see a way to give Tielmark a King without murdering a boy I have sworn to protect. I call upon you, Tullirius Caviedo, Bissanty Prince of Tielmark, to strike. Take my body for the earth, and free Bissanty for once and ever of Tielmark. History will call you Kingmaker, and you will live in ballads through the ages.”
Tullier stepped backward, increasing the distance between them. He pressed the blade flat between his palms, covering its sharp edges. “Does Richielle want this?”
“This is not Richielle’s choice.” Benet pressed forward. “Why do you even hesitate? You need not fear reprisals. I have arranged to guarantee your safety.”
“That may be,” Tullier said harshly, once more backing away. “But I have passed words with your wife, and nothing is plainer than this: If I were to take your life, there would be no sanctuary for me in Tielmark. That, you wouldn’t control from the tomb.”
Gaultry did not like the steady way Benet was holding the boy with his eyes. He was waiting for something. This talk with Tullier was merely preliminaries. He had something in reserve. Something he thought would force the boy to act.
“My Prince.” It was time to interrupt, time to try to disperse the rising aura of inevitability that Benet was invoking. She stepped forward out of
the mist, revealing her presence. The air of the dueling field had an unfamiliar dryness, a little shocking on her skin after the misty air where she had so long stood. “I apologize for not arriving sooner.” She glanced at Tullier, offering the boy a wobbly smile of what she hoped was encouragement. “I wish you had woken me.”
“Lady Gaultry,” Benet said easily. She did not deem it a good sign that he seemed to expect her. “It was good of you to come. A gathering of my witches indeed.”
There was a movement among the mist directly opposite. Richielle, with her long white hair bound up in an elaborate headdress of braids and leather sheathing. Her body was even more attenuated and gaunt than Gaultry remembered, but her expression was no less fierce.
“Brood-member,” she greeted Gaultry, bowing her head slightly. “You have come to vie with me to play Kingmaker after all. I won’t say it’s unexpected.” Her teeth were a flash of brightness in her shadowed face. Her hands moved within her robes, gathering power.
“What is she doing here?” Gaultry demanded. “After all you know of her evil history, why have you welcomed her? You know she doesn’t care what kind of a King rules Tielmark, what price we pay for our freedom.”
“Richielle has learned many things in her years of travel,” the Prince said in a hard tone. “Kingmaking among them. To discover the lore that produced her
Ein Raku,
she had to learn a great deal concerning weaponry, and the craft that it takes to vest it with the gods’ power. It may surprise you to learn that she has even made study of the Sha Muira cult.”
At this Tullier turned his head, a little too sharply.
“As you may know,” the Prince continued, beginning to unwind the blue scarf at his neck, “the Sha Muira sorceries do much to blur the line between the weapon, the one who wields it, and the one who falls to its attack.” The cloth came free, revealing a silver chain formed of diamondshaped, elongated links, looped four times around his throat. Benet drew it off in one smooth swift motion and ran the links through his fingers. He turned to Gaultry, coming down a little from the earthen dais. He did not quite hold out the chain to her, but the suggestion was there in his movements. “From Richielle, I have learned astonishing things about the Sha Muira training—”

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