The Rival (3 page)

He couldn't let her find him.  She would want explanations, and then she would drag him to their father to show the poor man that the boy he thought was his son was really a stone.

Or maybe she wouldn't.  She loved Sebastian despite his faults.  She was his best friend and his protector. 

She might see Gift as a threat.  She had never been to Shadowlands, the artificial home of the Fey.  She had never been around Fey, except for Solanda and a few others.  She thought like an Islander, not like a warrior, and that, he suspected, would hurt her when the time came.

Although she had not been in his Vision.

Which led him to believe that the Vision might be about him.

The robin circled lower and finally landed on top of the stone fence.  If he tilted his head slightly, he could see the tips of her claws, her feathered breast, and the underside of her beak.  The beak had a strange white mark at the base, like a birthmark.

The bird was Arianna, then, and she was directly above him.  If he so much as moved, she would see him.  His throat tickled with a sudden urge to cough.  His body wanted to give him away.  He wanted to talk to his sister for once, as half-breed to half-breed.  But now was not the time.

He had to find Sebastian, and then he had to think of a way to protect them both.

The Vision had been a simple one, and unusually clear. Visions were usually impressions, fleeting images, puzzles to be put together.  This one was an entire event, and he saw it two ways, which terrified him more.

In the first, he was standing in front of a Fey he had never seen before.  They appeared to be in the Islander palace, in a large room.  The room had a lot of Fey guards.  Behind them, the walls were covered with spears.  A throne rested on a dais, but no one sat on the throne.  On the wall behind it was a crest: two swords crossed over a heart. 

He had never been there before, but he recognized the crest.  It belonged to his father's family.

The Fey was a man with the leathered skin of a fighter.  His eyes were dark and empty, his hands gnarled with age.  He had the look of Gift's long-dead grandfather.  He was staring at Gift, hands out, eyes bright, as if Gift were an oddity, almost a religious curiosity.

Then Gift felt a sharp shattering pain in his back.  The Fey man yelled  —  his words blurring as his face blurred, as the room blurred, and then the Vision disappeared into darkness.

The second Vision was somehow more disturbing, even though it felt impersonal.  He wasn't in his body.  He floated above it, as if he were looking through a spy hole, or were a spider on the ceiling.  His body stood below, taller than the strange Fey man.  His body was exactly the same age it was now; it belonged to a teenager, not a full-grown Fey.  The man and Gift's body stood close together.  Fey guards circled the room.  Two guarded the door. The Fey carried no weapons, but some of them looked like Foot Soldiers, with slender deadly knife-sharp fingers. 

No one seemed to see him.

The older Fey wasn't speaking.  He was examining Gift's body as if it were a precious and rare commodity.  The body  —  and Gift  —  were studying the man in return. 

Then someone in a hooded cloak slipped through the door.  The Fey guards stepped aside, and the old man didn't see the intruder.  A gloved hand holding a long knife, appeared from inside the cloak, and with two quick steps, the intruder had crossed the room, and shoved the knife into the body's back.

Gift was screaming, but he couldn't get inside the body.  The old man was yelling, the door was open, and the intruder was gone.

The body lay on the floor, eyes wide, blood trailing from the corner of the mouth.  It coughed once, then its breath wheezed through its throat.  The wheeze ended in a sigh, and all the life disappeared from the face.

Gift's face.

And then the Vision ended.

Two versions of his own death.  One from inside his body  —  where he felt the final death-blow  —  and one from out. The Visions had started almost a month before.  Finally  —  yesterday  —  he went to the Shaman as she had taught him to do with difficult Visions long ago.  She had looked at him with compassion.

Did you know that each Visionary sees his own death?
she had asked.

He nodded.  He also knew that the death Vision could be changed.  He had seen his own death as a boy  —  when his real mother died, he should have died with her  —  but his friend Coulter had changed the path of that Vision. 

So this is mine?
he asked.

She shook her head. 
Two Visions, two paths.  In the second, you do not die.  Someone else does.

Sebastian did.  Sebastian, good innocent and childlike.  Sebastian, the golem who should not live and did.  Sebastian, whom Gift loved like a brother.  Sebastian, who had so much of Gift inside of him that Gift wasn't certain if one could survive without the other.

How do I stop it?
Gift asked.

You must change the path.

But how?

The Shaman shrugged. 
I have not seen this path.  We cannot compare.  The future is too murky.  Everything is changing now.  By next week, our lives will have a different meaning.

Try as he might, he could not get her to explain that last.  The job of a Shaman was to safeguard her people. And sometimes, safeguarding her people meant keeping their leaders in darkness.

Overhead, the robin sighed.  Gift resisted the urge to look up.  His arms were cramping, and his neck ached.  She had to leave sometime soon.  She had some sort of ceremony to go to, something Sebastian had tried to explain during the last Link.  But Gift's understanding of Islander rituals was poor at best, and he hadn't understood this one at all.

"By the Powers, Sebastian," Arianna said.  "You'll get us both in trouble."

And then she took off, stubby wings outstretched.  She had a grace, even in flight, that marked her as Fey.  Fey were so different from other races.  The Islanders, Gift knew, regarded the half-breeds as something less, as not quite worthy.  But the Fey, the Fey knew that half-breeds were stronger, that the magick flowed pure in undiluted blood.  The Shaman had once told him she thought it a cultural imperative for the Fey to continue conquering.  They had to move on, to find the purity that gave their power its ferocious strength.

But she spoke as if she disliked the Fey desire to conquer.  She spoke as if she had used the idea as a way to understand the warrior culture.

Gift was a half-breed.  He had Visions younger than any Fey, and he had built a Shadowlands without practice, by simply holding his grandfather's creation together.  His Links were fine and strong, and he could travel along them with no effort at all. 

Arianna Shifted into more than one form, unheard of among the Fey.  He didn't know what her other talents were.  He wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

But they were the only two half-breeds on the Island.  The Fey still hadn't co-mingled with the Islanders.  Most of the Fey still lived in Shadowlands, hiding in their protective Fey-made fort for nearly two decades now, sorry in defeat.

The Shaman said the Fey had never been like that before.

She warned that when the Black King came, he would slaughter them all for behavior unworthy of a warrior.

All except Gift, whom he could not slaughter, because Gift was of his own blood.  If the Black King's family turned on itself, all of the Fey would dissolve into chaos and insanity.  Gift and Arianna. They were safe.  None of the other Fey were.

He couldn't see her anymore.  The birds were again chirruping in the garden.  He stretched slowly, then eased out of the hole.  He glanced up for good measure, and saw nothing but blue sky.  Perhaps the garden wasn't the best way to go.  It was the only way he knew for certain.  But if he played this right, the guards would think he was Sebastian.

Gift's heart was pounding against his chest.  He had never gone into this palace before, not in his own body.  He had only walked  —  Linked —  with Sebastian, inside the golem's body, the case of stone. 

Gift didn't know what would happen if they caught him.

But he had to try.  He had to get Sebastian out of here, at least until he knew who the strange Fey was.  The Vision had happened in the near future.  And the only thing Gift could do to prevent his death and Sebastian's was to keep them away from Islander buildings, away from the palace, away from the cities.

He had to get Sebastian to Shadowlands.

And he knew Sebastian couldn't get there on his own.

FOUR

Nicholas adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves.  Lace fell over his wrists and onto the backs of his hands.  He tugged the sleeve of his waistcoat to his wristbones, and made certain that nothing touched the lace.  The ring Jewel gave him after the birth of Sebastian glinted on his left hand.

He tucked the shirt into his pants, then pulled his boots out of the wardrobe.  His dressing room was large, almost a room in itself.  This suite had been filled with laughter once, when Jewel was alive.  Hard to believe fifteen years had gone by.  He still saw her in his dreams.

And he still missed her, with a visceral ache.  He had the children, of course.  Sebastian, even though he was slow, was a model son, and Arianna looked like Jewel.  The girl acted more like Solanda, though, imperious, proud, and too confident.  Sometimes he wondered if he had done the right thing, letting Solanda act as a foster mother.  But he didn't know how he could have done otherwise.  Arianna was a special child, even for the Fey.  She Shape-Shifted as she came out of the womb, and continued to do so at random during her first few years of life. 

He leaned against the dressing room door.  He had asked to be alone this afternoon because he had known he would need it.  Sebastian turned eighteen this week.  Eighteen years since his birth, since he and Jewel realized that a single child wouldn't unite the two nations.  Eighteen years since they learned, bitterly, and finally irrevocably, that uniting the Fey and the Islanders would take a lot of work, work that Nicholas hadn't been able to do alone.

The Fey and Islanders had reached a silent truce since Jewel died, since her father died.  Many of the Fey stayed in Shadowlands which was a magickal construct, an artificial and invisible place to hide.  A few Fey lived on the Isle.  Those that scattered throughout, though, were treated like pariahs much of the time, and often threatened with holy water.  Holy water killed the Fey with a single touch  —  and the death was devastatingly horrible. 

The Fey melted.

The Fey were so frightened of it that the mention of holy water deterred them.  The Islanders made certain that the Fey kept their distance.

He grabbed his boots, sat down on the upholstered chair, and pulled them on.  They were calf leather, new and tight.  His feet would ache by the end of the day.  He hoped it would be worth it.

He had designed the ceremony himself, something the Rocaanists were already protesting. 

The religion and the kingdom were tied.  For centuries, holy water had been part of every ceremony held in Blue Isle.  But it hadn't been used in Nicholas's marriage to Jewel, and he had thought it wasn't going to be used in his coronation either.  But Matthias, the Fifty-First Rocaan, had other ideas.

Jewel had died that day, hideously.  If the Fey Shaman hadn't arrived, Arianna would have died too.  After that, Nicholas forbade the use of holy water anywhere near the palace.

And that still caused problems.  He sighed and ran his hands through his curls.  The Fifty-Second Rocaan, Titus, had already sent a letter of protest because the Prince wasn't going to be anointed as per ancient custom.  Nicholas had been anointed on his eighteenth birthday, confirmed as the heir to the throne by custom and tradition.  But holy water had never touched Sebastian, and Nicholas wouldn't trust his son's life to some theory that a half-Fey child could survive the touch of holy water.

Hence the Coming of Age Ceremony.  It was essentially the same thing as the Anointing, only it was done without Elders, Auds, or, most importantly, the Rocaan.

A handful of the lesser lords had already refused his invitation to attend.  He would deal with them later, after the ceremony, when he had a chance to think. Lord Egan had advised him, ages ago, to strip these upstart lords of their lands.  Nicholas had refused, thinking that it would make tensions worse.  But tensions had grown worse anyway  —  the lords still slurred him for his "unclean" marriage to a Fey, for his "illegitimate, half-breed" children, and for his non-traditional ways.  They were, in Egan's words, fomenting dissent, and as lords, they had a platform.  And maybe quite a bit of support.  Nicholas wasn't certain how much support they had, and he wasn't sure he wanted to find out.  He knew he would find out, though, the moment he took away their titular holdings, and their titles.

A sharp knock made him start.  He frowned at the door. 

"I told you not to disturb me, Sanders," he said.  His chamberlain sometimes had a mind of his own.  Nicholas hated to be nagged, and Sanders was a master at it.

"Forgive me, Sire." Sanders' voice, through the door, had a supercilious tone.  "But Lord Stowe has information that cannot wait."

"I'll see him at the ceremony."

"He claims it is important, Sire.  He is in your outer chamber."

Nicholas sighed.  Stowe was one of the older lords.  He had been Nicholas's father's trusted colleague, and was now one of Nicholas's.  But Stowe had the unlucky fortune to always bring Nicholas the worst news.

"Tell him I'll be right out," Nicholas said.

It probably had something to do with the ceremony.  So many people opposed Sebastian's position as heir.  But Nicholas had no choice.  The kingship always went to the oldest son, the direct male heir to the Roca.  Sebastian was slow, but he was thorough.  Arianna had already agreed to be his right hand, and Sebastian trusted her.  She was brilliant and unbeatable at anything she tried.

She would protect her brother, and the country, and keep them both safe.