The King's Blood (66 page)

Bedros lifted up the wafting flap of the largest tent with the blue banners of the frost dragon dancing upon it, and gently shoved Aldrin inside. The boy ducked down, surprising himself. The last time he saw his Father's old command center he practically ran under some of the knight's legs, trying to scatter away from the arguing and back to somewhere fun.

The lamps were drawn low, not wanting to waste precious fuel or possibly start a fire. Lackeys, faces who never seemed to let names stick to them, paced back and forth across the muddied grounds dropping documents onto an already overcrowded table or bringing bits of uneaten food to the shadow sitting bolt upright in the corner. Bedros bumped into Aldrin's frozen backside, causing the prince's shin to jangle a bin overstuffed with old maps. It was just enough of a jolt to send the entirety of Arda crashing to the ground.
 

"Who goes there?" the voice was deeper than what one expected from a Queen, hard as flint, and ready to break upon the head of anyone that disobeyed. Queen Moren was not loved for her charm.

"I bring joyous tidings, your Highness."

"Ah, Bedros," she chuckled, as if she could pick out each of her Generals by their toadiness. "You need not call me that anymore, you know," her voice trailed off, as if it were the middle of a never-ending fight.
 

"It is what Elric would have preferred," Bedros said solemnly.

"Elric would have preferred to not be decapitated," she said bitterly, pushing off some of the lackeys still buttering around the edges as if the intrusion had no effect on their day. The shadow rose on unsteady feet, and walked into the light. "But you said you have news..."

"Joyous news, my...Lady," he finished to avoid her pained wrath. This regime change was going to be difficult for everyone, not all wanted to support the spoiled brat who fell onto the throne.

The Queen slid carefully into the light, her feet having trouble finding a proper footing as she rose wobbly to her barely full height, and came to Aldrin's chin. A piece of cloth was wound about her chest and pinned jaggedly as if someone yanked off her breastplate in a hurry and realized later they should try to maintain their Queen's modesty. Probably because of the still oozing wound deep in her shoulder. The bandages weren't doing much to stop the blood trickling onto her modesty tube top and down to the still armored greaves she wore.

Her calculating eyes of brass looked up at the man Bedros dragged in and traveled about his chin and nose, trying to place why he seemed so familiar. "Bonny?" she asked in the closest to a quavering voice the Queen ever managed.

Aldrin, feeling very self-conscious at everyone's gaze suddenly upon him, tried to lower himself down to her eye line. This towering over people was best left to the elephants. He nodded noncommittally, afraid that with his unveiling she'd just as likely stab him as hug him.

But the Queen was never one to do the expected. She dropped her hand from her chest and held it out to the prince. He very gently took it, expecting a trap, but she gripped his warmly and shook. "How in Scepticar's Grand Name did you get here? We all feared we lost you after the snake betrayed us."

"It's a very long story," Aldrin admitted, her hand still crushing his.

"I imagine so, involving talking bears, and moon dust and witches," Moren had a rather unhealthy obsession with bard's tales.

"Ah," Aldrin shrugged, trying to put off the fact he left a witch sitting at the fire, "something approaching that."

"What do you know of our situation?" The Queen asked him, all fantasy dripping off her voice as her ever-present reality seeped back.

"Not much, we were discovered by your very intelligent scouts out on the battlefield," Aldrin white lied through his teeth, but Moren had known the boy since he was three, his face covered in sugar declaring it must have been a dragon that ate all the cookies. She also had first hand knowledge of the scouts still left to her command; men who couldn't cut it as the village idiot.

"We are still piecing it together ourselves," she admitted, letting go of his hand as if she finally convinced herself he was real. "The armies of the east marched towards Ostero when our 'very intelligent' scouts picked up ships flying the Empire's banner in the Isentic Sea. We barely arrived when they already foolishly stormed the beach," Moren sucked in a breath as her hand brushed against a table, her wound opening up at the exertion.

Aldrin didn't even think, he just placed a careful hand on the elbow of her damaged shoulder and tried to lead her back to the healer's chair. For a moment, the Queen was surprised and resisted, but her body relented, already exhausted from the energy spent rising towards the guests. She sat down hard in the chair, and her only functioning hand gripped the side of her right arm, steadying it. As her fingers pulled away from her skin, claw marks from fighting off the pain raised in their wake.

The prince noticed some wine probably mixed with the few healing herbs the army's doctors carried and began to pour a cup while the Queen tried to claw back her dignity. He handed the cup to her left hand and sat back on his haunches as she sipped. "I, there is a healer with me, a priest of Hospar."

Moren didn't seem to hear the boy, but Bedros responded, "A priest of Hospar? They refuse to fight against the invading Empire!"
 

"Well, he's not a very good one," Aldrin mumbled back at the flames from a man who'd been drafting men in perhaps not the most kindest of fashion for the past three months.

The Queen's delicate fingers placed the cup on her small table already overcrowded with missives, and let her hand come to rest on Aldrin's shoulder. "Did he know who you are?"

Aldrin nodded, he'd been unable to keep his secret hidden from anyone. Sometimes, he suspected even the random rabble in the crowds the Historians played to knew that the boy pretending to be a mighty giant was really a lowly prince. His old stab wound panged as his mind trailed back to Kaltar, who'd been far too kind for his fate.

"Then the healer can remain and hopefully do some good," the Queen commanded.
 

"There are others too, a wi...woman who can help the priest, and probably won't leave his side, and a dark girl. She's...she's the reason I'm still alive," Aldrin confessed to Moren.

The Queen nodded slowly, "Bedros, go and see to their comfort. Make certain they have enough to eat and a dry place to rest."

"My Lady?" Bedros asked without questioning her, or so he hoped.

"Our Prince and I need to talk, privately," she dropped any feigned sweetness, finding the veneer never suited her. The Commander bobbed his head and shooed out the other lackeys. Only Aldrin remained, his ass still hovering a few inches off the muddy ground.
 

Whatever mask she'd managed to summon broke away and her strained face crashed into jagged crevices Aldrin didn't remember. She reached up to her shoulder and peeked under the bandage.
 

"Kuchi sin," the Queen cursed in her rarely used native tongue, "that kopele did a right job."

At the boy's curious but not grossed out eyes she explained, "Arrow, right to the shoulder. I should have expected it, but..." Aldrin pulled out one of the few sponges soaking in some cold water. He wrung it out, but knew from his own experience it was going to sting. Pulling the bandage off his stepmother's naked shoulder, he tried to not look too deeply into the burrowed hole of her ruptured muscle and flesh. Instead, he dribbled some water into it and then dabbed away the rushing mix of blood and pus. Moren's nails dug into the chair with the pain but she held her tongue, knowing her always worried general's were right outside the tent, listening in.

"A poultice?" he asked, looking about for something similar to the putrefying goo he rubbed on his own side for weeks.

"The butchers left something that smells like rotting yak piss in a bucket over there," she gestured through her sweating brow at the corner.

Aldrin found it by following his nose, a pungent odor that could take down the entire Empire's army in a closed space. Perhaps they should put that in the battle plans "maybe" pile. Trying to cut off his nose by flexing his face, Aldrin dug a deep wad of the poultice onto his fingers and slathered it on before adding a bandage.

As he began to wrap, Moren rose out of her pain coma and watched the boy she'd barely known. What she remembered was some knock-kneed child, stumbling in his brother's shadow and trying to be forgotten by the rest of the gentry. He usually got his wish, as there were always other matters to be attended. But now, she dare dream, he seemed almost competent. A leader?

As Aldrin rose away from his ministrations, a weary hand followed, coming to rest on his cheek. The Queen's brass eyes that always burned like the mechanical hounds of the underworld softened and melted in the lamplight. "I was a terrible mother to you."

"No," Aldrin disagreed before her words even sank in. They'd never exchanged more than a handful beyond, "Yes, my Queen." "Sorry, your Highness." and "It was Henrik what tracked in the mud!" He assumed she couldn't see the prince child past the lines of soldiers that would beat down the door.

"Do not lie to save my feelings," she admonished, that fiery glint returning, "I never had the family touch, and all you children slipped into the background."

"All except Henrik," Aldrin muttered, hoping she'd take her royal hand away.

"Yes," invoking his brother seemed to pull her out of her reprieve, and her hand dropped. The shield of warrior Queen fell back into place almost as quickly as it vanished, "There are vipers amongst us."

"I know."

"You do?" Moren sat back causing her wound to jar, but she ignored the pain shooting through the deadening arm. The doctors wouldn't be straight with her, but she already knew she was likely to lose almost all control of it.
 

"I was there when father...when the King was assassinated," saying it that way made it feel cold and distant. Murdered was too fresh and painful. Assassinated was clinical. Aldrin could deal with assassinated.

His muddled Ostero eyes shifted up to hers, narrowing, "But you were not."

"No," she admitted, "I was not. I stormed out prior to find your lout of a brother when my own lady intercepted me and warned of men moving about the castle. Oh, Edwina..." she lapsed into a silence the prince was growing all too familiar with. A moment for the fallen. "While the Empire cut through our front lines, I dashed out the back through the unguarded stables."

"You left your husband to die," Aldrin's voice was crisp, as if he was accusing her of taking the last biscuit.

She didn't flinch away from the child, no, not a child anymore, but not yet a man. That trial was yet to come, she feared, "Yes, I did. And I would again. It allowed me a chance to raise whatever might I could, to shore up our lands, to prepare for this..." her dead hand thudded to her lap and dragged across her bloodstained greaves.
 

"You're doing a stellar job," Aldrin muttered to himself. The young boy would have shirked away as the Queen glared at him for his aside, but the young man only glared back, daring her to disagree.
 

"Do you believe me? Or am I the one who sided with the enemy to kill my husband and closest friends?" Moren harvested her words carefully, as if she could easily fend off an armed teenage boy trying to avenge his fallen father in her state.

But Aldrin only nodded slowly. He never liked her, but he never hated her either. Not the way Henrik did. Not the way he was supposed to.

"And what of you, prince of the realm? How did you survive a castle under siege?"
 

Despite himself Aldrin laughed, a harsh bark from his throat, at the idea that he could have been a ringleader of anything, much less the possible destruction of his entire world. The idea of answering with a sarcastic, "Yes, I confess, it was me. I planned the entire thing while I was crawling under the knights' knees and wrote to the Emperor with some drawings of a cat I once saw." But he noted the glint of silver in the Queen's left hand. She was probably awful with it, but he was in no mood for another stab wound to his guts.

"A Knight of the Lord Albrant, he saved me."

"A Knight...is he still with you?" she was calculating in her mind.

"No, he returned to the fight to help free his men," Aldrin shook his head, "He found his daughter and she led me out. We were to meet at Tumbler's End but..."

"Of course!" Moren interrupted, the pieces of hearsay and rumors finally slotting into place, "Albrant and his surviving Knights made for the Tower of Ashar. A wise move. But there's still the matter of..."

"Henrik's with them," Aldrin finished for her, "We heard from the people at Tumbler's End."

"And they're certain Henrik was within the army?" Moren pushed.

"'That spotty prattling brat of a King,' yeah, I think they're fairly certain," Aldrin said, trying to stave off his memories of that wretched town.
 

But Moren didn't laugh, her mind already calculating. She'd suspected Henrik survived. There'd been little crowing from the few Empire prisoner's they'd taken about slaying the crowned prince, only taunts of slicing open her husband's head like a melon before she slit their throats. But the rumors were convoluted, some were certain it was King Elric in the north, or that Henrik was raising her army. One even put little Bonny in adorable curls locked at the top of a high tower.

So, if they could press to the Tower of Ashar, form a conclave and begin the push against... "Confound it all, what is it?"

The rhythmic tapping against her tent's flap stopped and a small head poked in, "Sorry to disturb you Ma'am! Urgent News! Ma'am!"

"Messengers, gods save me from messengers," Moren muttered before waving her good hand at him, "Yes, yes, come in."

The man entered, not much taller than Isa, but most of that came from his bowed legs from a lifetime on the back of a horse. Messengers rarely were offered a seat, mostly because no one wanted their good chairs shot through. He looked about at the Queen's boudoir chambers, before remembering to bow.