Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (30 page)

Riordan couldn’t decide if he admired her cool or wanted to throttle her. Or if that was his bloodlust talking, looking for something—anything—he could cut down and make pay.

He glared at her instead. “Why did they all come up here together in a giant group? Then just . . . sit around?”

“Sharing information isn’t quite as pointless an exercise as it might look.” There was no obvious reproach in Kathlyn’s words or her tone, but still. Riordan felt it. One more thing he didn’t like at all. “Especially when it’s all we have. And they weren’t up here by choice.” She sat straighter, if possible, though he didn’t see her move. “The men were placing bids. They have an opportunity to do so every hour and they prefer to do it where none of us can hear how they lowball our charms.”

Riordan tried to imagine what it would be like to be sent off somewhere out of sight while other people decided his fate. For the coming winter or for the rest of his life, and without particular regard for his thoughts on the matter. He found he couldn’t.

“Do the dresses mean something?” he asked, maybe a little gruffly.

“The colors do.” Kathlyn’s mouth curved. “Copper gowns are for women who are ready for a permanent marriage. Silver gowns are for those available for regular winter marriages. Though it’s all for show, really. It’s not as if any of us get to decide these things.”

“And gold?”

The princess’s mouth lost its curve. “Gold is for virgins. Untouched in every way.”

Riordan blinked at that, as Eiryn reached them.

She studied Kathlyn. “I thought they auctioned that shit off.”

“Oh, they do.” The princess looked serene, though her dark eyes were hard. “My auction has been going on for three Septembers now. My father claims all of the bids he’s received for his only daughter, by definition a prize beyond price, are insulting.” She waited as if she expected them to say something or as if there was a rote response neither of them offered her. “He thinks if he waits long enough, my maidenhead will become a myth, much like the stories of his prowess in battle. Men have already offered outrageous fortunes and whole territories. I don’t think he’ll be happy until someone offers him the whole planet.”

“Why does anyone want your virginity or anyone else’s?” Eiryn asked, sounding baffled. “Virginity is four awkward seconds, some blood, and then everyone moves on to much better things.”

Kathlyn looked brittle for the first time since she’d stepped out from behind that curtain. Her dark gaze glittered, suggesting a temper she didn’t quite show. Not quite.

“I have weekly checkups to determine the state of my innocence,” she said evenly. Too evenly. “And the punishment for losing it without permission is death. I couldn’t tell you why they care. Only that they do.”

That hung there in the shimmering, bright air, like a new reflected sparkle from those dresses.

“Your father sounds like a great guy,” Riordan muttered. “But I don’t really care about his personality or the shit he pulls on his own family. Tell me about his army.”

“Right.” Kathlyn stood up, smoothing the flowing gold of her dress as she rose, in what might have been her only betrayal of any nerves since she’d stepped out from behind the curtain. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“His army is here?” Eiryn sounded skeptical.

“Not exactly.” She paused. “You shouldn’t wear that dress. It suggests a certain availability.”

Eiryn tilted her chin down and gazed at the copper horror that clung to her breasts and then fell to the floor. Not that it made her any less beautiful. Riordan doubted anything could diminish her. She was Eiryn, for fuck’s sake. But the dress did make her a little bit blinding when the light hit her the wrong way.

“I thought it was for a permanent marriage,” she muttered, frowning as if the dress blinded her, too.

“For the daughters of the sort of wealthy men who can control that, yes. For girls from men of lesser means, it signals that they’ve already lost their maidenhead and have spent a few winters learning some tricks. There are a lot of men here who would happily indulge themselves in such easy pickings, then claim it never happened and that the lower ranked woman was only trying to better her station with wild accusations.” Kathlyn lifted a smooth brown shoulder, then dropped it. “The church and the western kings take a dim view of desperate women who try to entrap noble men.”

Eiryn looked at Riordan as she tugged at the zipper at the side of her dress, forcing it down.

“I think I’d enjoy meeting those men,” she said, her tone like a blade. “I’d like to teach them a thing or two about what
easy pickings
really are.”

“How big is your father’s army?” Riordan asked the princess when Eiryn kicked off the dress and then took her regular compliant clothes back from him. It was a measure of how serious the situation was that he didn’t look at his woman’s perfect tits as she set about wrapping them up right there in front of him. Or anyway, he didn’t linger. “Do you mean trained militias or mercenaries?”

“Both, I think.” Kathlyn went over and tucked the copper gown Eiryn had discarded around the naked girl, still sprawled out and unconscious next to her friend, covering her. “He’s had men building war ships in the Kansas City dockyards.”

Eiryn muttered a low curse. Riordan didn’t need to echo it. He felt that same blow. They’d walked right past those dockyards a little over a week ago. They’d been within spitting distance of the clan’s possible destruction and they’d had no fucking clue. They didn’t even look at each other, no doubt both marinating in the same sense of epic failure.

Still, when Kathlyn headed to the arched doorway, they both followed her. Riordan took the rear, trying to keep his cool when all he wanted to do was start cutting assholes in half. The princess led them out of the great waiting room, back down the gleaming hallway and, this time, down the far grander main staircase that swirled around in a showy marble circle.

Life on the eastern islands didn’t lend itself to much marble, which was a good thing as far as Riordan was concerned, because it turned out he hated it. Too cold, too hard. Too much bullshit statement, not enough function.

And too polluted by the goddamned church that was obviously obsessed with it.

“Shouldn’t we try
not
to announce our presence to all the priests and noble dickheads?” Eiryn asked as she followed the princess down the stairs, shifting to walk in that particular way of hers that Riordan had always liked a little too much.

Some called it creepy, the way she moved so silently and seemed almost to float above the ground. But he figured anyone who didn’t recognize that as the skill it was probably had a few concerns she’d turn that skill on them.

She was still his favorite ghost, he thought as he watched her move the way only she could. Whatever else had happened out here in all these strange mountains and terrible cities, that hadn’t changed. Riordan knew somehow it never would.

And the timing on that revelation was seriously wacked.

“I’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re my servants,” Kathlyn was saying in reply. “But they won’t ask.”

“Because we look so much like servants?” Eiryn asked. In a voice that suggested a sharp blade was already in her hand, though it wasn’t.

Riordan saw the flash of the princess’s smile, and the way she quickly bit it back.

“No,” she said. “Because there are very few people at this party tonight who would dare question King Athenian’s only daughter about anything, and almost all of them are entirely too busy holding court in their own right to come make things awkward for me.”

She led them down to a floor they hadn’t explored before, this one nothing but dimly lit hallways rushing off in three different directions. It was quieter here. Almost subdued, as if the whole floor had been closed down for the evening and all the lamps switched off to discourage anyone from exploring it. The princess looked around as if she expected to see someone looming around in the shadows, then moved across to a great pane of windows that looked out over Cathedral Square and the city beyond.

It was so
bright
. It almost hurt Riordan’s eyes, and it had nothing to do with the dazzling clothes so many of the aristocrats wore as they circled each other like sharks in the gardens below. It was the whole damned city. There were people in settlements back east who thought electric light was a fairy tale. There were clan members who had grown up on the mainland who’d never lived through a winter with a generator, relying on good, old-fashioned fires and religiously well-tended lanterns to get them through the rains. Riordan’s father had been stingy with the farm’s single, small generator and its precious fuel. He’d kept it in reserve for emergencies in the barn involving animals or a threat to the crops. And he’d lit up the house on the December solstice, as a single and solitary treat, to remind them all the sun was coming back again in a few months. That was it. Even in the raider city where they had a ton of generators and where the fuel they’d claimed in so many raids was plentiful, they used lights sparingly. There were very few streetlamps, and they didn’t stay on all night long. And there were certainly no lights left on in empty rooms. What would be the point?

But here, light was everywhere, so garish and thick it was impossible to see the stars. Ropes of radiant light marked streets stretching out into the night, as if there was nothing precious or rare about it. Every part of Cathedral Square was ablaze. The windows of all the buildings within his view were glowing, illuminating nothing as they spilled all that precious light down on the people below.

It was a waste. It was a deliberate show of strength and wealth, he was sure of it.
Fuck you
lights. It made something in his gut twist into a hard knot, and it only got harder when he dropped his gaze to take in the fancy aristocratic party going on below him.

“Maybe we thank you for your warning and exterminate your douchebag father here and now,” Riordan gritted out, a world of fury in his low tone.

“Now you’re talking a religion I understand,” Eiryn agreed in an instant. Her dark eyes glittered. “Blood.”

Kathlyn moved to the window, keeping to the darker parts of the hall—so no one could look up and see her, Riordan figured. It suggested she’d spent some time spying on people—another little fact he filed away.

“Look,” she said when they both joined her. She nodded out at the crowd below, all of them moving around and around the fountains and the patches of sculptured green as if they were performing some large-scale, intricate dance. “Between the party and the gates, what do you see?”

“Cathedral guards,” Riordan said, studying the men who stood in formation there, moving at prearranged signals to maintain their perimeter. He’d watched them last night, too, and concluded that while they were certainly not a raider-level defense, they were infinitely better than, say, the joke of the fools manning the Louisville wall.

“The Cathedral guards stand at the entrances,” Kathlyn corrected him gently. Somehow, he knew what she was going to say next. He felt it in that same gnarled thing twisting up his gut. “They’re more interested in protecting the building and the bishop than the guests. That’s my father’s personal guard detail. The small cadre he travels with, to places he feels safe.”

“There are at least fifty men,” Eiryn muttered. Which meant she’d counted them at least twice and knew there were more than that, just as Riordan had.

“There are five more who surround him wherever he goes,” the princess said. She pointed to a thick knot of shiny nobles. “And five others who prowl around him when he’s out in public like this, looking for potential threats. Look.”

Riordan looked. He saw the prowling guards first, noticeable because everyone else danced and swayed to the currents of the gathering except them. Then he tracked back to the five bodyguards, all jacked up and dripping in guns and blades. And in the center was . . . a man. Just a little man. He’d probably come up to Riordan’s shoulder. And yet he stood there in a too-bright robe, exuding the kind of confidence that no man without a visible weapon ever should.

Beside him, Eiryn muttered a curse. Riordan knew why. Every raider loved going up against the odds. It was satisfying in the extreme to prove, yet again, why the brotherhood lived up to every scary story ever told about them. But there was a difference between bad odds and straight-up suicide. He and Eiryn could do a lot of damage. But they couldn’t withstand fifty guards
plus
the ten near the king
plus
whatever variables all those aristocratic assholes and the various priests might bring to the situation.

And if the two of them died here in a failed attempt to nip this shit in the bud, what would happen to the clan in March?

Kathlyn turned to look at the two of them, her expression somber.

“Please listen to me. I understand that if even a third of the stories people tell about raiders are true—”

Eiryn’s smile was deadly. “They’re all true.”

The princess nodded. “When I tell you my father is gathering an army, I don’t mean a small one.”

Riordan eyed the guards again. The paranoid tool of a king who thought he could bring a fight to the raider city when he couldn’t even stand in a party without half an army at his side. He took in all that offensive light, so intensely bright it made it seem as if the rest of the world wasn’t
right there
on the other side of this untouched, untested city. He caught Eiryn’s dark gaze for a moment and understood the searing thing that passed between them then. The certain knowledge that everything that mattered to them, everything they’d pledged their lives to protect, was at risk. That nothing mattered more than that.

Then, finally, he studied the woman who stood before them, handing over the kind of information he had to assume could wreck her own life if she were discovered.

“Tell me this,” he said after a long moment. “Why would you risk this? If your father finds out you gave a few raiders the head’s up on his plan—”

“He would kill me without hesitation.” Kathlyn’s voice was too brisk to be truly bitter. “After he auctioned off my virginity for a high price, of course, because a betrayal shouldn’t be permitted to get in the way of profit. He’d enjoy that. He likes to drag things out and really make them hurt.” She smiled, but it only made the bleakness in her dark gold gaze that much more apparent. “My father is a very creative man, especially when it comes to anyone he feels has wronged him.”