Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (37 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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Lepulio must have taken this into account when he had offered Tullier the priceless implements of Bissanty’s Tielmaran throne.
Tullier’s response to Gaultry’s story of the Brood disturbed her: his almost academic satisfaction at an Imperial mystery explained. Insofar as this revelation might relate to his own life or future, he was unnervingly serene.
In part, he was unconcerned because he did not believe in the goat-herder Richielle, but mostly because he did not believe there was an easy recipe to catch the attention of the gods.
“Who knows what factors conspire to make a King?” he said. “Something that might have worked five decades back will almost certainly not reach the same result attempted under this year’s sky.”
“That doesn’t mean some power-hungry lunatic isn’t trying!” Gaultry wanted to shake him.
“If we know the plan, we can defeat it,”
“Let’s hope that’s true,” Gaultry said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to work harder to find another way to make Tielmark a Kingship.”
I
f this was a dream, she should have been able to wake herself up.
She had been running a long time now. Around her, her surroundings had become progressively more intricate and confused. Here, an iridescent framework of glass towered overhead, impossibly delicate and complex. This chamber, a symphony of glass and sparking water fountains, was the most breathtaking so far, and at the same time the most debilitating. Jets of water rose from the floor, dampening her clothes, hampering her movement. Her body felt as stressed as if she truly had been running, her lungs dry and painful.
If this was a dream, the shuddering of overtaxed lungs would not be slowing her.
Her pursuer—she knew she had a pursuer—stalked her with stubborn persistence, ever on her heels, ever unseen. She had tried to shake herself awake so many times now. Each attempt only served to open doors deeper into the enthralling labyrinth.
Her attempts to wake up had jolted her onto broken steps, dashed her over balconies, sent her falling down into new levels of tiled chambers. One attempt had sent her stumbling through a series of doors, endless until she had understood their rhythm, deliberately stumbled, and broken it. Once she’d found herself clinging to carved banister-supports, climbing the outside of a staircase. Always, a sense of her pursuer dogged her.
Now, standing beneath the towering roof of the glass water-hall, she was tiring. The search for egresses took such hard effort. One part of her wanted only to lie itself down to rest.
If she did not find sanctuary soon, her gut warned that her unseen
pursuer would take her. That thought, and that thought only, kept her moving.
The water-jet hall was beautiful, a serene place, but she could not remain there. With a surge of will, she continued wading forward through the fountains until at last they parted, revealing the way on.
The next corridor loomed more surreal even than the water and glass chamber. Living flowers carpeted the floor underfoot, and the green and brown bark-covered walls were lined with portraits of men and women, their identities concealed behind beast-faced masks. Their hands and bodies had been painted to correspond with the masks: a bear-man, a weasel-woman, a sheep-man in a woolly judge’s wig.
The last picture in the row, the only portrait left unmasked, was Benet’s.
The Prince’s expression was mournful, the set of his mouth determined and sad. Though dressed in a Prince’s ceremonial regalia, a plain soldier’s cowl covered his tawny hair. Clasped between his hands was a gold crown set with blood-colored rubies, surmounted by God-King Andion’s sunburst emblem. The points of the brazen sun had cut Benet’s fingers, drawing blood. As Gaultry stopped to study the portrait, the image quivered and began to transform.
Benet’s features faded. From beneath, Tullier’s green eyes emerged, his arrogant chin, his hungry expression. But Tullier too clasped the kingly crown, so tightly that his closed lips twisted with pain. The picture looked so real that Gaultry reached to soothe him, but even as her fingers touched the surface, the picture cycled again to show Benet. Gaultry withdrew her hand. The human melancholy visible in both men’s eyes was the only constant, disturbing after the parade of inhuman animal masks.
She would have stood and waited for the picture to change again—oblivious now to her pursuer—but something shattered noisily, breaking the picture’s hypnotic allure.
Bare paces away, a spiral stair ascended. It had not been there when she last looked. Unlike the glass hall and the portrait gallery, with their hyperreal intensity, their elaborate colors and carved doors that led her to nowhere, this stair was grey and misty, achromatic.
A sudden urgency, like a sending, came to her.
Quickly now: escape lies here—
Entering that stair was like stepping into the land of vision. The stone was grey, the light diffuse. A numbness came over her laboring body as
she ascended. After countless featureless turns of the spiral, a small window came into view. The glass had been shattered from its mullions, leaving only a framework of flimsy metal bars. Shards of glass crunched under her feet as she approached. Whatever had broken the window had forced itself inward.
A chill wind underlain with musk hit her face as she looked out onto the grey prospect of a distant, mist-shrouded hill. Within the mist, atop the hill’s far crest, a figure waited, infinitely patient, malign.
I have the answers.
Those words reverberated through the mist like the sound of falling gravel. Those words took up all the space outside the window, like thunder in a storm-filled sky. A voice hardened by age and power and arrogance. The words rode the wind, compulsive and fearful together.
Receive them of me
.
Gaultry grasped the mullions and heaved. There was no time to descend through the castle to reach the caller. The bright-colored maze of passages and stairs would enfold her, or she would run into the arms of her enemy. If only she could break the bars, she could transform herself into a bird—she could fly from the tower and reach the hill. This madness coursed through her like a stream rising in flood. Even as she understood the insanity, she could not keep from throwing herself once more into the attempt.
A strip of mullion-leading popped free, then the base of another. If only the mullions were not so close, so small! As she pried at a third bar, an eerie wail forestalled her.
She paused, struck still by that cry, trying to place it. When the cry came again, she knew. That cry was the flowers that carpeted the portrait hall. Someone passed along the corridor, crushing them underfoot. Someone who came for her.
The call from the far hill rose again, louder and more insistent.
Glamour-soul,
it cried.
Come to me! All answers are found in me.
But despite the three broken window-leads, that way on remained closed. From below, the sounds of her pursuer on the stairs jarred her ears. She would not get the window open in time. Raw fear battled the compulsion of the hill-watcher’s call and won. Gaultry fled onward up the tightening spiral.
I am dreaming,
she told herself.
I am dreaming
,
and I will not stay in this dream
. As she ran, stumbling ever upward, she pressed her palms against her breastbone. Strengthened volition rose in her as she touched at her power there. She would not be the plaything of these forces who
had invaded her night’s sleep: her unseen pursuer; the watcher on the hill. She could—she would—fight them.
I will not stay in this dream
. Calling on her deepest will, she invoked the power within her breast.
I will not stay here
. Golden heat flared, enfolding her newfound resolution with stays of power. At the moment her Glamour blossomed, she met, running at full tilt, the face of an invisible wall.
It shattered as she smacked into it, the collision sending her reeling. Invisible spell-wreckage fluttered in the air, brushing, then prickling, her skin.
Half stunned, she stumbled on the stone-grey steps, struggling for more than mere physical balance. A spell. The wall had been a spell, trapping her in her own mind as she slept. She had broken it, but was she free? The coil of grey stairs that lay before her remained outwardly unchanged.
I want to be in my own bed.
To her immense relief, the stairs rounded a curve and revealed a familiar paneled door, painted with red birds and foliage. Gasping with relief, Gaultry thrust the door open and fell into a bedchamber—her own.
There was her bed, her nightstand, the age-beaten paneling of her room in the Summer Palace. Her thought, empowered by her magic, had taken the effect of a counterspell, bringing her to the place of her desire. There were her clothes, her hunting kit. All her familiar things—and something else.
Even within the dream, she flushed.
Her heart had conjured more than she’d intended.
Martin smiled to her from the room’s shadows. Though fully dressed in soldier’s garb, the texture of carelessly folded cloth was pressed on his cheek, as though he had been awoken from deep slumber.
What is wrong, my beloved?
He rubbed his eyes and groggily moved toward her.
Why did you call me?
Nothing is wrong
. She slipped her arms around him.
I am having a bad dream
.
I cannot protect you from bad dreams.
You can.
She kissed his throat. The true taste of his skin was there, the true smell.
Hold me. Fill my dream with all things of my desire
.
Gladly
—the wolfish smile lit his whole face. His clothes opened and parted, and he pressed her against the warmth of his bare flesh. He raised her in his arms, as easily, as weightlessly, as he had done that morning in the sea, and settled with her on the bed.
O my love
. In dream they could dissolve; in time-hung dream they could luxuriate in the embrace that circumstances of life would not allow them. This truth moved within the wild play of their spectral caress with a gentleness, with a water-smoothness detached from the texture and feel of life. But Gaultry, as she touched him, became slowly aware of something else: the solid drumbeat of Martin’s heart, the strained pulsing of his blood. She could feel it under her fingers, she could hear it in her ears. That sound was not dream. It was—it was a warning that she could not ignore.
This presence—Martin—was not a harmless illusion, god-sent or otherwise, visiting only her mind. It was a magical fetch. Some physical part of her beloved lay with her within this room, even as his body, miles away, slept huddled in a cloak by the roadside. What stress, what strain, had she put on him, unthinkingly drawing a part of him to her across that great divide of space?
She bent and pressed her mouth to his ear—
Leave me now
. As fleetingly fast as her escape on the grey stairs of dream, the words invoked her will. A gold flash spread beneath her.
I should not have brought you here
.
There’s danger
.
Martin frowned as she spoke, an expression of worried revelation crossing his face. He reached for her—and then he was gone, leaving empty sheets.
She was alone. Alone in the bed, knowing that she was still lost in dream, that her enemy lurked not far outside her door. She lay stone-still. If she was quiet, if she was still, perhaps her enemy would not find her.
She lay immobile, trying to hold in even her breathing. She imagined that all might be well, until, horribly, a pulse of power crawled over her, a thousand tiny feelers spreading across her body in a wave. On the pillow by her cheek, she sensed a delicate movement.
I will not stay in this dream
, she screamed, but in the wake of her tryst with Martin, that mantra had lost its strength. All she could do was remain still, very still, willing the motion to pass her by. It was not enough. At the edge of her vision, something long and thin rustled, growing swiftly toward her along the pillow. A creeper, black-green, with tiny, pointed, devil’s foot leaves. Black-green. Avenger-green. The color of the angry magic that had snared her on the bridge, the angry magic that would have killed the Prince but for Mervion’s intervention. The creeper, moving fast as a snake, wound itself into her hair where it lay fanned on the pillow.
Too late, she tried to fling herself from the bed. The vines dragged her back, tangling ever more insistently into her hair, along her limbs. Panic overcame her. The creepers that had seized her wrists lashed toward the bedposts, binding her so tightly that she could hardly move. The attack was so all-consuming, so fast and angry, she did not know where to begin to try to free herself.
As her struggles grew feebler the vines, crackling with power, began massing at her head. Like agitated maggots, the biparted leaves grubbed at her skin, pressing, rustling against the hollows of her ears.
The nightmare—not the nightmare, the spell—blossomed to full maturity with the vine. Something pricked at her scalp. The vines wreathing her skull put out long brittle thorns as they tightened. These pressed like tiny daggers at her scalp, her temples, drawing blood where she jerked her head against the pillow.
She could not collect her will. She could not break free. Panicked revelation filled her, a reservoir of hidden knowledge burst free: the enemy was outside her door, but she—the enemy—had not sent the killing-crown. If Gaultry could just call her, she would stop the attack. However much she hated Gaultry, she would not let the crown build, would not let the vines bear their killing fruit—
This is a dream
, Gaultry screamed.
O help me! I cannot be killed this way!
The horror—dying, helpless, in a dream! A dazzling image of the Goddess-Twins, their impassive faces, their impossible beauty, flashed before her, even as her strength failed. O
Elianté,
she called. Was it too late to pray, now her own strength was weakening?
Emiera, the Great Lady
.
Have you come to watch me die?
Beautiful Emiera studied her with infinite calm. Impossibly graceful, she reached out her divine hand—

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