Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (60 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“Don’t!” Tullier begged abruptly, verging almost on panic.
Benet ignored him, implacable. “The rituals the young apprentices undertake are most appalling. Each draws the supplicants deeper inside the cult, binding them with a guilt so strong that only the blessing of
their Goddess can relieve them. You know, of course, that the acolytes are all poisoned, and wear internal chains of pain. But that is the least of what they undergo to become Sha Muira. Your Tullier, of course, had completed the entire course—save for returning to Sha Muira island with proofs of his first kill.”
“What is that chain?” Gaultry could not hold back the question.
“Gaultry,” Tullier said softly. “Please. Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it. I am not that. I am—everything that I am is what you made me.”
She hesitated, torn between his plea and a terrible desire to know what knowledge, what act, could so fill him with remorse and dread. As she delayed, a ray of the new day’s light daggered over the rim of the earthwork walls and pierced the mist. Benet swung around and opened his hands over his head, snapping the chain tight. He was just tall enough that the light caught the chain’s links, preternaturally bright.
Beyond the Prince, Richielle had made the same motion. This light flashing on the chain was no act of the gods, but neither was it coincidence. Richielle’s spells had wreathed the field with its barrier cover of fog, now she was playing tricks with the light she allowed to penetrate. No doubt she intended to hold the light of dawn in abeyance until the Prince and Tullier reached the moment of climax in her desired tableau.
“You know what this chain is.” The Prince spoke directly to Tullier. “You know what it will reveal. Banish the hope that you will have her love, Tullirius. Banish the hope that you will keep even her respect.”
Tullier cast Gaultry a forlorn look. All she could do back was shake her head, not understanding. Despite this, something he saw in her expression steadied him. His young face lit with sudden unexpected pride, with determination. “You have no understanding of my life,” he told Benet. “No understanding of the threats by which you could move me. I never expected to live these past weeks. Every day has been a gift. I will not taint the beauty of that benefaction with my greed.” He made as if to hand the dagger back to Benet. “I submit to you, Benet of Tielmark. As Llara is my god, I offer this to you freely: Keep my secrets, and take my life in their stead.”
Benet could not conceal his surprise. “Boy—” he started.
Then Richielle took a step forward. Her head was bent, as if in submission, but her hands moved a binding gesture.
When Benet spoke again, his voice was cold. “That sounds almost noble, coming from a Sha Muira. But the price for keeping your secrets—it will not be
your
life. I vowed to protect you, and I will not be swayed
from that. So if you would keep your secrets from Lady Gaultry—you know what you must do.”
This lack of mercy was not like Benet. Clearly, Richielle was influencing him, even if that influence was not so strong that she could force him to break his protection pledge.
“My Prince,” Gaultry said. “If Tullier does not wish me to learn what that chain has to tell me, I will honor his request. Goddess-Twins! Do not twist our friendship to such foul purpose.”
“Lady Gaultry, it is not for you to choose what you will or will not know.” Benet, shaking his head, coiled the chain around his hand. “I have already learned the Sha Muira secret of these links. As your liege, it is my right to share that grief with you.”
He would have spoken further, but Tullier leapt. His hands were empty—the Kingmaker blade had been slipped away, hidden somewhere among his clothes. He grabbed for the diamond-linked chain. Benet made the error of sweeping it up, above the boy’s reach, opening his stomach for a blow—which Tullier readily supplied. The two of them crumpled into a tangle of limbs and elbows. Benet was by far stronger, but Tullier was Sha Muira–trained, and he quickly took the advantage. If the chain had not tangled about Benet’s wrist, the boy would have had it away in quick seconds.
The Prince was martially trained himself, and he fell into a defensive posture. Regrouping from his surprise, he closed on Tullier with all his angry strength, forcing the boy back. The two whirled in a circle like a big dog fighting a cat. The cat would do all the damage—until the moment the dog caught it in its jaws.
As Benet lunged, pushing Tullier backward off the dueling hummock, a sense of movement drew Gaultry’s attention from the struggle. Richielle was almost at her sleeve. Gaultry took a swift pace back, maintaining a cautious distance.
“Your boy’s weakness and strength both are in that chain.” The goat-herder smirked to see the younger women’s retreat.
“Don’t come near me!” It was terrible enough, watching the two men fight, without having to fend off Richielle.
The goat-herder’s extended hand opened wide like a spider’s legs. “As you love the boy,” she said tauntingly, “wouldn’t you like to know what he did to forge that chain’s links?”
“You can never leave events to take their own course, can you?” Gaultry raged, her attention torn between her desire to separate the
Prince from Tullier and her fear of this old woman. “You impose a hidden influence; you force everything with magic. Do you trust yourself so little that you must distrust everyone else?”
Atop the earthen dais, the fighting was becoming uglier. Benet let out a cry of anger and pain combined as Tullier struck him, hard, across the side of his neck. In retaliation, he swung the chain at Tullier’s face. If Tullier had not been standing on uneven ground, his reflexive step backward would not have been enough to save the ear on the side of his head where the chain struck him.
“Duty has finally laid its hands on Tielmark’s Prince,” Richielle jeered at Gaultry, once more reaching out. “Now all we need to do is call forth your boy’s deepest instincts.” Somehow, the herder touched her wrist. A crackle of power ran up Gaultry’s arm, fleet as liquid wildfire. “Here, boy!” Richielle cried. “Look what you are fighting for!”
A sheath of yellow flame formed a flashing aureole around Gaultry’s body, then faded. Tullier, casting over a flickering glance in the moment Richielle called, paled, then ducked a blow from Benet.
“What did he see?” Gaultry said furiously. The spell had faded as quickly as it had come.
Richielle smiled, and did not answer.
The two men closed, briefly grappling. When they spun apart, Tullier had somehow taken charge of the silver chain. He flung it, in a shining arc, so hard and far that it disappeared into the mist. But Benet—in the split second when everyone’s eyes were on the chain’s arc, Benet located the Kingmaker blade among Tullier’s clothes. He pulled it free, and feinted with it at Tullier.
“You have sworn not to harm him!” Gaultry howled. She would have darted forward then, but a movement from Richielle at her side forestalled her. “You
are
maneuvering the Prince.” Gaultry swung accusingly on the goat-herder. “He defied your sorcerous compulsion to kill, but he couldn’t stop you from insinuating yourself into his plans.”
Richielle’s eyes were amused and malevolent. “I have only brought what he already wants to the surface. I told you: No future will grow from seeds that are not there from the start. Even a brave man has within a kernel of desperation. And your boy—” The old woman shot Gaultry a calculating look, its evil so strong that the young woman shuddered. “Your boy lived almost fifteen years for the pure joy of killing. It is not a desire two months have buried deep!”
Gaultry swung back to the grappling figures, appalled.
Whatever it was that Richielle was doing,
both
men were abetting it. Benet’s attack on Tullier was calculated to fill him with the heat of a killing rage—but Tullier
wanted
to be angry enough to kill him now. The light Richielle had flared on Gaultry’s skin—it had shown him something that made him want to fight.
In a sudden flurry of movement, the boy wrested the
Ein Raku
from his opponent’s hand. Benet threw himself forward and grabbed a handful of Tullier’s hair. As the boy fended him off, the blade flashed perilously close to Benet’s jugular.
“Andion, God-King,” Richielle intoned, sensing the approach of one man’s victory. She made a wiping motion up to the sky, over in the direction where the sun was rising, and the fog began to burn away. “Stand witness: A King will be made today, and we beg your reverence for the blessing of it. I stand here today as Kingmaker, begging your acquiescence.”
The sun’s golden face burst suddenly through, transforming all it touched from ghostly grey to brilliant color. Gaultry shivered.
Andion God-King!
she prayed.
Don’t listen to her. She is too bitter and angry to make a king.
At her side, Richielle repeated her invocation.
“Shut your face.” Gaultry struck Richielle in the mouth with a force that surprised them both. “Old woman, your time came and went fifty years past. I’m not going to stand here and let you do this.”
For a moment, a quiver of doubt glistened in the goat-herder’s eyes. Then the old woman reached for the breast of her robes, where she carried her Rhasan cards. “You cannot stop me!”
“Your cards are watered!” Gaultry told her, the wrath inside her building. “Your words have lost their strength to form the future! Fifty years of planning have made you weak, not strong!” She lashed out with a blow of golden power. “If you want to keep me out of this, you should have brought your magic sheep!”
The old woman staggered back.
The young woman struck again, with a queasy confidence that the old woman’s bones could not withstand her, and drove Richielle to her knees. The golden power that surged through her was like an echo of the pleasure she had felt with Martin. Gaultry would have laughed, had Richielle’s fear not been there to taint the moment. She had feared her Glamour power for so long—if only she had known how good it would feel to possess it!
A cry from behind her, either Benet or Tullier, returned her in a flash from this interlude of exhilaration. Gaultry glanced down at Richielle, on her knees but still mumbling: calling a spell that would part the fog and bring Andion’s full light upon them. Even on her knees, the goat-herder was still trying to play Kingmaker.
Timing, Gaultry thought. This was about timing. Richielle—she was the distraction, not the focus. The important thing here was that Andion’s light not shine down upon a violent death. Summoning her strength, she turned back to Benet and Tullier. “Stop it, both of you,” she shrieked. As she touched Benet’s cloak, a muffled sensation numbed her fingers. The Prince and Tullier were shielded by a powerful magic that bound them both to the
Ein Raku:
The power of Richielle’s soul, pulsing outward from the metal.
For a moment Gaultry scrabbled ineffectively at the surface of the magic shield. Tullier’s hand, with Benet’s clasped over it, slashed by her face. She jerked away—almost not fast enough. A blaze of heat touched her cheek as the
Ein Raku
tagged her, miraculously not opening the skin.
Behind her, Richielle was laughing.
It was too much. She would not let the old hag win. Her magic flared outward, a searing golden ball of flame, and she thrust it toward the darkness that was Richielle’s soul, that was the Kingmaker blade. Tullier and Benet cried together in pain—and then the blade spun clear of both men’s hands. Richielle shrieked in rage, but could not regroup before Gaultry had fallen on the blade and seized it up.
Gaultry scrambled up the hummock to the center of the dueling ground. She held the Kingmaker up to the rising sun. “God-King! See! The goat-herder spoke what she could not deliver!”
“Achavell take you!” Richielle shrieked. “You will not stop me so easily!”
The old witch spread her hands wide, as if greeting a powerful presence. Gaultry felt a dangerous gathering of magic. “I acknowledge it for truth: My Kingmaker days are gone! But Tielmark must be freed of Bissanty chains, and another must rise to take my place.” The goat-herder staggered and fell, the effort she was putting into this new spell overwhelming her. “The Kingmaker is
Gaultry Blas!”
The compulsion that swept the young huntress-witch was more sadness than killing-rage. As she stood, sheathed in golden power, holding the ugly dark shard that was Richielle’s soul, the presence of every man
who had stood on this earthen dais before her rose through her. Brave men, cowards, braggarts, fools, all come west to Haute-Tielmark to fight for the land’s integrity.
Now it was her turn.
Her Prince stood before her, unarmed and willing to offer his heart’s blood to the earth. All that was needed was a loyal subject, a subject who could do what must be done to free Tielmark ever and always from the specter of Bissanty
rule.
The image was so strong, so real, she could not conceive that it could be a false sending. This was her moment. As if through a cloud, she saw the truth:
She must grant the Prince’s wish. She could play Kingmaker; she would be the one to fulfill the old Brood-prophecy, freeing Tie/mark, her family, everyone she loved.
Benet, seeing her expression, extricated himself from Tullier and joined her on the hummock. The rising sun caught the rich wheat color of his hair, lighting it like flame. His eyes were serious and serene together.

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