The King's Blood (49 page)

Aldrin, begrudgingly placed in front as their ambassador, turned back to the robes peering from the lead wagon. At the gaze of their prince, the men flew away from the window. Slowly, each rattling wagon of the convoy came to a rest, recently thawed dust kicking up into a still wind.
 

Ciara cracked open Medwin's door, barely pausing as she jogged up to Aldrin, who seemed like he'd been stood up as he waved his rusty sword at the silent city. "This is..."

"Eerie," Ciara finished for him, "like that dead city."

"Only worse." The prince's eyes followed along stone houses, built to hold two or three families a row, rimming a well-worn road branching off to more adorable back alleys. Each roof was painted an alternating shade of mossy green or red the same shade as Aldrin's sword. A handful of window boxes, waiting for the seedlings of spring, hung from arched windows boarded up in a hurry. They weren't the ruins of a long forgotten Empire's reach exceeding its grasp, but the homes of people who'd hammered and painted their entire beings into the four walls.
 

A single food stand sat forlornly beside one of the wells, long abandoned. A hand drawn sign hanging off the front offered three turnips for a Chickpea, or a squash and two potatoes for two Turnips.
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Plentiful fall harvest was never changed for the coming winter.
 

"It's as if they all picked up and ran," Ciara said, glancing down into the dark pits of a well over brimming with melted snow.

Aldrin's eyes turned to the windows, their drapes drawn tight behind a blockade of wood. A yellow mark, hastily painted onto a plank, blocked some of the doors. "The war?" he suggested, "Maybe they're with the army."

"Yeah," Ciara said, "maybe," knowing in her heart that no army would suffer a gaggle of useless women and children. At least not those unwilling to perform certain services.

A boisterous voice called out from the second caravan, "Well, isn't this charming." Kynton, growing restless and uncomfortable with his overextended legs jammed into his chest, tumbled from the second wagon. The trip was not one he wished to repeat, over a week with only enough room for him to occasionally cross one leg over the other while the fatter of the historians babbled about the miracles of an all garlic diet.

The ex-priest meandered up to the teenagers, not bothering to lower his voice in the claustrophobic quiet of the silent city. He spent half his life in the equivalent of a living library; he was immune to the social cues. "It's been a few decades, but has all of humanity cast off the trappings of city life and returned to the wilds? I must say, I wouldn't mind joining them. This robe can get rather restrictive," he joked, tugging at the starched collar.

Aldrin glared at the man, doing his best to not look over at Ciara. But the priest just smiled back, enjoying his bit of peacocking. Maybe later they could try and butt heads over the dark maiden's hand. Or have a very deadly game of checkers. The twins hadn't accidentally eaten all of the pieces yet.
 

"The army won't be camped in the town," Ciara said, paying no attention to the grungy priest as he peered into the well before tossing a stone into it.

"You an expert on the comings and goings of armies?" Kynton asked her, "Must be hard finding armor to fit you."

The girl crossed her arms but Aldrin leapt to her defense, a fact that did not endear him to her,
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"She's right, the bulk of the horde would be sheltered near the watchtowers, while only chosen platoons would be sent into town on a rotating basis." His hours spent trapped with a droning Kaltar and Grang Gor's
Secrets of Killing The Other Bastard And Calling It War
pressed to his nose were not entirely in vain.

A cough echoed across the abandoned street as a grimy witch approached solemnly from the East, having been forced off most of the unpaved road into the muck and treacle runoff in the ditches. If magic were powered by hatred, their entire caravan would have been leveled with a single thought. Instead, pale eyes smoldered murder beneath a hastily tied crimson scarf.
 

"My lady," Kynton bowed to Isa as she stalked forward, her mouth puckered and her nose curled.
 

"Shove a flaming poker up your ass," she mumbled to the priest, stopping short of the group. The witch preferred to keep her distance, even if there was no one else about.

Kynton grinned, "You bring a ray of sunshine everywhere you travel."

Sparks flew; the kind that ended in priests with burnt livers and charred flesh. Isa's finger rose as she walked crisply towards Kynton, who took the magic in stride. Just as she was about to give him such a static shock his teeth would rattle, a noise reverberated around the empty street.

"Did you..." Aldrin started, only to be answered by another clap of wooden thunder, this time a board off one of the windows teetered and slammed back in place.
 

"It would seem we're not alone after all," Ciara said cautiously. Armies didn't tend to hide behind doors unless something went terribly wrong.

One of the doors, painted an unassuming blue with gold trimming, shook on its hinges and popped free. A woman, hunched over as if the cares of an entire nation rested upon her shoulders, hustled through the black hole. Her greying hair was stringy and pushed back into place with a quickly tied bandage. What looked once to be a quaint country outfit that the freshly rising middle class flocked to, was covered in stains and obscured by an old apron that had seen better dynasties.

She scuttled up towards the group, not pausing to look around the dead street, and came to rest at the foot of the ex-priest. Barely grazing Kynton's midsection, her eyes as baggy as burlap looked into the priest's face.

"Are you a brother of the faith? Of Lady Hospar?" her voice was surprisingly crisp and quick, as her mind clung to sanity by the power of fervent hope.
 

Kynton gulped, but put his convoluted backstory at the back of the file cabinet as he beatifically gazed down upon this nearly broken woman, "Yes, my child."

His canned response seemed less ridiculous as she broke into tears at his confession, grabbing his soft hand and bringing it to her lips. "You have come," she cried, "I prayed and prayed for a savior, but I feared she'd turned her back upon us."

The priest opened his mouth, but closed it as her platitudes and gratitude washed over him. He spent most of his time on the receiving end of grief, this rush of relief made his skin crawl. Ciara tried to intercede; the only one of the group used to women weeping openly, "Could you tell us what happened here?"

The woman paused and looked at the girl, barely into womanhood, and shrieked. Her untended fingernails dug into the priest's hand, and Kynton shrieked in pain as he grabbed onto her wrist trying to free himself before he got some horrible peasant blood disease.

"We only just arrived," Aldrin tried to intercede, but the woman would not be distracted as she rose up on her tip toes to face down Ciara.

Kynton finally extracted his hand from her claw, white welts raising up in response, as she snarled at the dark one in the group, "Demon of the night, you are not welcome here anymore!" And with the assuredness of a knight raising his sword, the old woman folded her fingers into a sign of the eye of Scepticar at Ciara.

For her part, the demon blinked back and slowly folded her arms. The woman shook her hands, inching the eye closer. When that had no affect, she waved her fingers and made 'Woo Woo' noises.

"Why not try holy vinegar next," Isa suggested, enjoying the sight of someone else on the back end of superstitious idiocy.

"Yes!" the old woman snapped her fingers, before digging into her pocket. But Kynton reached out and grabbed her frail wrist again.

"Before we go dousing people in acid..." the old woman looked up into the eyes of her angel and slowly let the bottle slip back into the pocket next to her lucky snake's foot. Kynton released his grip and shifted back, "There. Now, you prayed for the Hospars?"

"And you came!"

"Yes, truly she works in mysterious ways," he mumbled quickly. "Who were your prayers for?"

The old woman grabbed Kynton's hand like a starving python coiled around a rabbit and yanked him. Unbeknownst to him, his feet began to obey, pulling him after the crazy old bat as she descended back into her cave.

The ex-priest glanced back at the three still gathered around the well, all of them feeling slightly excluded, before he vanished into the darkness within. Isa rolled her shoulders and looked to the sky, "It seems the only answer to your problem rests behind that blue door."

Aldrin nodded and looked towards Ciara, who was still trying to shake off the burning hatred in that woman's eyes, "After you, night demon."

Ciara playfully socked him in the shoulder, but tried to ignore a desperate scream inside her head that this was not a safe place. Fear, mistrust, bigotry she was used to. Being an other in a sea of bland was a Tuesday. But this was the first time she'd seen a fear so rabid it could drive normal people to do unspeakable acts. Gods, why'd she have to lose her dagger?

Aldrin covered his nose as he ducked into the hovel, Ciara quick on his heels. It stank first of garlic so potent it'd wipe out an entire conclave of vampires before they put their box of dirt down to check the mail. Underneath the alum burned a mix of soot and ash with a piquant of incense; the same the priests would toss into their holy fires every morning to clear the air.

But even the garlic and incense failed to hide the distinct haunt of death clinging to every air particle filling the room with dread and collapse. The failing walls of grey stone were coated with its pallor. A lone table, big enough to feed a growing family, housed only a smattering of dishes and piles of discarded rags, some coated in bile. Dried flowers, hung jovially before the coming winter, were crisped and crackling over the doorways, ready to burst to dust with a small breeze. But in the home of the dead, not a molecule of air stirred, letting the decay linger upon itself.

"Kynton?" Aldrin called, trying to breathe through his mouth and talk at the same time. This only caused the smell to catch at the back of his throat.

"In here," the priest responded, his tone more solemn than Aldrin expected from a man who seemed to only take his jokes seriously. Ciara gagged behind him and the prince felt a strange sense of relief, if it bothered her then it must be bad.

Isa, always the last to the party, cracked open the door and poked her head in. "Have they set you aflame yet?" she asked Ciara.

But she chose to ignore the witch, pointing her finger towards the only flickering light that wasn't a gentrified fire. Aldrin tried to square his shoulders up. He hadn't been looking forward to meeting with his family's most trusted advisors and having to tell them his father was dead. But with Tumbler's End in sight he tried to shake off the dread resting upon his brow and face his future head on.

Instead, he walked face first into an ever-widening mystery. "Can anything ever go right?" he asked himself.

"No, that would be too easy," Ciara responded honestly.

"Remind me to never take up sewing, I'd probably prick myself in the finger and slip into a coma," he muttered as he crossed the threshold of the living room deeper into the narrow sleeping quarters.
 

A pair of beds were pushed together on the far wall, empty and alone, but well worn with stains clinging to the deflated mattresses as if someone salvaged the stuffing before tossing the forgotten casings. To his right, he spotted Kynton's blue robe, bent over, as the old woman sat upon the edge of a bed, her hand still upon the priest to make certain he was real.

The bed was huge, taking up most of the wall, with only a small table to accompany it. It was stocked high with bottles, plates, saucers, rags, and anything else a person might need to live their life frozen in that ancillary spot.

As the prince shifted deeper into the room, a small figure appeared between the priest and the woman. Like a broken reed tossed beneath a kerchief, the tiny body was limp and twisted. Legs stuck out below the folds of the blanket at heart breaking angles as if the muscles took on a life of their own and twisted contrary to anatomy, cracking the bones with them.

Kynton stepped away from the bed with a spray of blonde hair, ashy and lifeless, spread out across a pillow. The face was so sunken the eyes were a pair of shuttered black holes, and the lips of the wasting child peeled back from protruding teeth as it struggled to breathe.

A gasp caught in Aldrin's throat as he looked down upon the dying child, while the mother stroked the fine hair and sang softly under her breath an old lullaby. The priest turned his grey eyes, softer by the dancing lamp light, upon the prince and the night demon. He shook his head slowly.

Isa poked her own head around the corner, a jaded eye taking in the deathbed scene. The witch recognized all the signs of the spasms sickness. It started simply enough with a strange twitch in the fingers or the toes, then entire legs were moving on their own. By the final stages, the muscles moved so violently bones shattered and ribs popped. Most suffocated as their own body punctured their lungs. Hard to stop spreading, near impossible to heal. Her head poked back out into the living room, away from the contagion shattering the child.