Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (5 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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He smiled, tiredly, glancing over his shoulder, perhaps to see how close the Sharif and Tullier were riding. “You have accomplished amazing
things, my love. For everyone around you. I can grant you a little shortness of temper.” As she gave him a wan smile, he urged his horse against hers, and gently bumped her leg with his own. “But unfortunately,” he continued more seriously, “the events to which we are bound range far beyond our own desires. You will have to keep your temper better if you want to make any headway at court.”
Gaultry sighed. “I know. Huntress help me! I can only trust that Benet will forgive my small trespasses in return for my larger services. Or that his court around him will have persuaded him to do so. Your grandmother has his ear, of course, but so as well does Dervla.” The High Priestess of Tielmark was a jealous, somewhat spiteful woman, with whom Gaultry had clashed too often for comfort in the past. “And then there is the rest of the ducal council. Will they follow your grandmother’s lead, or Dervla’s? The Prince’s courtiers—”
“Not to mention the other members of the Common Brood.” Martin frowned. “Or all the people Tullier alienated, with his attack upon the Prince, before you whisked him out of Tielmark from under their ravening noses.
“What we’ve learned since about Tullier’s heritage makes him more valuable to Tielmark alive than dead.”
“That is so,” Martin conceded, “and all the more reason that you must speak to the Prince before tangling with the others.” He brought his horse against hers once again. “It’s all going to unfold too quickly. After we arrive in Princeport, we will no longer be our own masters. With the summer campaign against the Lanai started, it won’t be long before I’m sent west to fight at the border. It does not please me to know that I will have to leave you to fight for the boy alone.”
She looked hastily away from him, off ahead down the road. Half a mile away and a short climb up a hill, a tall tree marked a boundary into more rugged territory. Arriving in Princeport only to have to be parted from Martin was not something she wanted to think about. “Perhaps it will not be so bad,” she said. “The very fact that Tullier was born puts the Bissanty succession in doubt. Tielmark could become free of Bissanty by simple merit of the Imperial line’s collapse.”
Martin shook his head. “Tielmark has to make its own freedom. Bissanty has been collapsing on itself for centuries. The fact that the line of Imperial succession is in disarray is more threatening, not less so. Since we crossed Tielmark’s border, we’ve been hearing time and time again
about the battles to our west. It’s not the usual summer campaign. The Bissanty raised a huge force against the Lanai this year. Come disarray, an empire wants its citizens looking outward, not inward toward a shaking throne.”
She shivered. “Sciuttarus is still Emperor. Tullier being here doesn’t affect that.”
Martin shrugged. “If Sciuttarus has lost the Goddess’s blessing, everything is affected.”
He was right. They had skirted riots throughout the last days of their flight from Bissanty. The scraps of song they’d heard, the rumors, the terrible omens: crops sickening, calves dying—and the unspoken awe with which the Bissanty land-bonded regarded Tullier—all pointed to a profound disruption to the order which had held the Empire together for so many centuries.
“That said,” Martin continued, “You’re right. Sciuttarus hasn’t lost any of his practical power. As sitting Emperor, he has much in his hands to ensure that power will remain with him while breath is still in his body. The campaign against the Lanai confirms it. He wants a distraction—and he doesn’t want the army at home in Bassorah to rise against him—while he sorts out family business.”
“He wants Tielmark too,” Gaultry said.
“Two birds with one stone.”
Tullier’s pony jogged up to Gaultry’s stirrup. The boy whose birth threatened the Imperial succession was short, with a deceptively light build, black hair, and intense slanted eyes the color of green ice. When Gaultry had first met him, those eyes had shone with constant rage and pain. Now, after weeks under Gaultry’s protection, his expressions, if not softening, were at least becoming more varied.
Gaultry sighed. Of course, most of the boy’s emotions were still problematic, not least among them his ill-concealed jealousy of her feelings toward Martin. He hated to see Gaultry with Martin—and hated it even more when the pair of them discussed his future outside his presence.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
Gaultry gave him a falsely bright smile. “If we reach Soiscroix tonight, we should be able to make it to Princeport by tomorrow evening. We’ve just been talking about what we can expect when we reach the city.”
“Nothing good for me.” Tullier raised his brows. He was sensitive enough to know when she was humoring him, and to dislike it. “Did you
see the look that awful pig-woman gave me? She hated me—without even knowing who I was. That’s how everyone in Tielmark will feel, once they know who I am.”
“I’ll protect you,” said Gaultry, nettled. It exhausted her, constantly having to reassure him, though sadly there was no doubt that he needed any comfort she could give him.
Tullier had been a Sha Muira apprentice when she first met him, a member of the Bissanty assassin cult where his father, the sitting Emperor’s uncle, had hidden him from the time Tullier was a newborn. He had been trained to commit atrocities without questioning, to expect death at any moment—indeed, to accept death as a blessed event, uniting him with Grey Llara, the mother-goddess of Bissanty. That upbringing continued to haunt him, not least with the reflexive certainty that mercy would not be offered where he himself had never expected it.
“They’ll want to string me up for what happened to those boys my old master killed,” Tullier said. “I don’t see how you’ll protect me from that.”
Gaultry did not know how to answer him. In his last act as a Sha Muira, Tullier had been involved in a brutal attempt to compromise the right to rule of Tielmark’s reigning Prince. There had been five murders, not just two. From hints Tullier had dropped, she knew that he had been responsible for the death of at least one of the boys’ guards.
“You’re privy to a blood tie that devastates the sitting Emperor’s right to succession,” she said. “That will be more important to Tielmark than what you did while the Sha Muira ruled you.”
“Only if you manage to explain before the mob seizes me.”
“They’ll have to get past my own dead body first,” Gaultry replied grimly. “That at least I can promise you.” She kicked her horse into a trot, taking advantage of a gap between two wagons to slip out of conversational range.
She hoped the things she was telling Tullier were true, or that she would have the power to make them true.
It was hard, riding on this easy road and pretending that the gods and death weren’t riding with them. Gaultry would have preferred almost any open confrontation to that hidden specter of doom.
What help was it to acknowledge that Tullier and Martin were at each other’s throats; that the Sharif was growing thin with longing for her desert home; that the animals she had rescued from the Bissanty inferno were languishing? All she could do was ride on, hoping that the
journey would end before any of these problems reached crisis.
Her own inadequacies were worst of all. The events that had brought them to this road had wakened Gaultry’s long dormant magical powers: the blazing golden fire of her Glamour-magic. That magic had the capacity to give her a power akin to the greatest strength that could be called down from the Twelve Highest Gods—and without the necessity of prayers, of bowing and scraping to distant, mysterious, and oft-distracted deities.
But what help was this if she was still frustrated by pig farmers, still set to confusion by the complexity of her country’s fate, and still incapable of using her magic to help herself or her friends? Her magical power was like a golden sun, but she could not control its power—when she came close enough even to touch it, it burned her, with immolating strength. Those few times she had called upon it—in extremity, when no other course opened itself—the consequences were terrible and harsh. It took her body days to recover from the aftereffects.
Her sense of inadequacy rose like bile in her throat. She rode on, struggling to ignore her many anxieties.
B
y mid-afternoon the road began to descend over a series of granite ridges to the wooded edge of a river bluff. Though the day had become seasonably warm, a cooling breeze fanned up from the river. Overhead, the screen of leafy branches sheltered the riders from the bright summer sun.
Under the green ceiling of leaves, the crowd thinned as it stretched along the road. Gaultry finally found herself relaxing. She loved the scents of birch and oak, of pineberry and redleaf-rustin and even the darker smells: the moss and decaying leaf mold. Leaving her horse to find its own footing, she stared dreamily out over the drop to the river. The tannin-dark water rushed mysteriously over jumbled stones, making little falls and pools, overhung with ferns and wisps of pink flower.
This was the Tielmark she loved. Its wild loneliness, its beauty.
The riverbank opposite was a solid ridge of granite topped with young pine volunteers, trending gradually toward the near bank, forcing the water fast and high as the stream channel narrowed. It reminded Gaultry of a place near her home on the south border where a limestone-bedded creek made narrow, slippery slides down into deeper, river-dark pools. The fast water was a little dangerous, but Gaultry and her twin sister, Mervion, had spent many summer days lazing there, alternately sunning
on the rocks and cooling themselves with laughing rides down the wildly slippery water chutes.
The memory of that cool water made her feel acutely how long it had been since her last full bath. Two weeks, and longer. Not since before their flight began from Bissanty. Counting the days back did nothing to improve the suddenly itchy feel of her skin.
“There’s a bridge ahead.” Martin, who had been riding in front, slowed his horse to ride with her. “Warn the Sharif that her ‘shadow’ will have to find its own place to make a crossing. There’s some kind of gathering at the bridge.”
Tullier was once again at Martin’s shoulder, edgy and unwilling to let them speak privately.
“I wish there was a place where we could climb down to the water to cool off.” Gaultry stood up in her stirrups to relieve the heat that had gathered on her seat. “Or even swim across, or ford, rather than going over with everyone else. I don’t like the idea of yet another crowd.”
“If there were a place to ford, there wouldn’t be a bridge,” Martin said thinly. “Can’t you trust your temper for two minutes together?”
“What’s wrong with Gaultry looking to find her own way?” As Tullier spoke, he moved his pony, subtly, so Martin’s horse was forced to break its pace. “If Gaultry wants to swim, why not? There must be a place where we can make our way down. It’s not as though we’re laden with market-goods and a cart.”
Gaultry shot Tullier a wary look. She had become so accustomed to the boy challenging her that his support was unsettling. He often backed her now, even in her smallest caprices—much to Martin’s displeasure.
Still—she did want her swim. “Why not?” she asked. “A short break would give Aneitha a chance to find her way over.”
Aneitha-cat was aggressive, constantly hungry, and her narrow, rangy body challenged the size of Tullier’s pony. Only her intelligence, enhanced by the soul-bond she had briefly shared with the Sharif, made it possible for her to stay with them, on the hazy understanding that the journey would return her to her natural home. Since they had crossed into Tielmark, the great cat had been forced to range the countryside as their shadow. There had been a number of awkward moments, even guessing that the Sharif had kept the worst from her.
The sooner Aneitha and the Sharif were shipborne and homeward bound for far Ardain, the better. Both were fast losing flesh and condition in this unfamiliar damp country.
“Aneitha has to take care of herself. If she can’t keep up, that can’t be our problem.” Martin scowled at Tullier, a rare show of irritation, then turned back to Gaultry. “We’re not stopping and taking off our clothes to go swimming. We all need to reach Princeport. We both need to explain ourselves to Benet—you more than I.” He reached for a lock of her horse’s mane and twined it loosely around his fingers. “Don’t ask for what I can’t give you.”
The curl of yellow horsehair looked gold against Martin’s sun-darkened skin. Gold, like a marriage ring. An unfortunate coincidence, considering that Martin was married, however honestly estranged from his wife. They both saw it at the same moment. Gaultry jerked her reins, making the horse start so it twisted the lock of mane free.
“I’d give you anything—” Martin said, suddenly intense.
“I try not to ask for impossible things.” She patted her horse’s neck, at once apologizing to it and comforting herself. “We have a bridge to cross. That’s clear enough.” Ignoring Tullier’s look of glee—though clearly he did not have the least idea what they were arguing about, or what they were trying not to argue about—she swung away, looking for the Sharif, and female comfort.
The Ardanae war-leader had dropped to the back of the party. Her eyes met Gaultry’s. The woman shrugged.
Arguing again?
she asked.
They’re proud men. They both want your first loyalty.
Despite brutal fatigue that made her slump in the saddle, the Sharif’s mind-voice pierced Gaultry through, clear as ever. The woman had suffered tremendous hardships: as a casualty of war, as a slave chained to an oar, and then in her flight with Gaultry across half of Southern Bissanty. Gaultry wished she had served the woman better—but there had never been adequate time to rest and recoup their strength.

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