Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1) (14 page)

Hoping to delay her confession and avoid showing off her new skin color to Brishen, she asked him about his wrestling bout.  “Did you win?”

“No.  Nefiritsen is my best wrestler.  He remains unbeaten in all matches so far.  If any of us must face an enemy in unarmed combat, we want him beside us.”

They entered the castle, passed through the great hall and climbed one of the two stairwells that flanked either side of the high-ceilinged chamber.  Candlelight lit their way down the corridor.  Ildiko didn’t stumble around in the dark as often these days, but she was glad for the candles and their anemic luminescence.

She stopped in front of her door, turned to face Brishen, and adopted what she hoped was a nonchalant expression, especially when he was standing before her half naked.   She tried not to let her avid gaze linger on him too long.  “You’ll want a bath I’m sure.  I’ll meet you later for a meal or some wine?”

Brishen placed a hand over hers on the door latch.  “You’ll not get rid of me that quickly, wife.  My cousin said you dove into a dye vat.  I’ll be on my way once you satisfy my curiosity.”

Resolved to the inevitable, she motioned him inside.  Sinhue was elsewhere, probably getting an earful from another servant or soldier about how Brishen’s homely wife tried to make herself more pleasing to the eye by dying herself pink.  If horses traveled as fast as gossip, they’d blow their riders clear off their backs.

Brishen laughed only a little when Ildiko removed her cloak, shrugged off her ruined tunic and revealed her arms, neck and shift dappled in varying shades of the summer rose.

“I look ridiculous,” she huffed.

“You look pink,” he replied.  He circled her slowly.  “And you chose to bathe in amaranthine why?”

Ildiko told him the story of her necklace.  “I didn’t want to lose it.  I know someone could have fished it out of the vat for me, but I panicked.”  She lifted the necklace from where it nestled under her bodice laces and handed it to Brishen.  “I think it’s worth very little in coin but is precious to me.  The clasp broke as I leaned over to get a closer look at the cold dye.”

Brishen raised the chain for a better look.  “It’s a good piece.  Remember the constable from Halmatus?”  Ildiko nodded.  “A jeweler resides there.  He can repair the clasp or fashion a new chain for your necklace.”

Ildiko eyed the necklace longingly.  Her hand itched to snatch it out of Brishen’s grasp, but she squelched the urge.  He deserved her trust, even with those things precious and irreplaceable to her.  She clasped her hands behind her back.  “Would it take long to fix the clasp?”

He must have heard something in her voice, something hesitant and fearful.  “Not long.  I can deliver it myself if you like.”

Ildiko clapped her hands.  “Oh yes, please, would you?”  Mortification rushed in hard on the heels of euphoria.  “I’m sorry, Brishen,” she said.  “You’re not a messenger boy.  Someone else can go.”

Brishen offered the necklace to her, his head cocked in a way that Ildiko was fast recognizing as a sign of his amusement.  “You misunderstand me, Ildiko.  I’m not going alone.  You’ll go with me.  I’ve no eye for the delicacies of a woman’s trinkets.  You can deal with the jeweler.  I’ll just be there to keep you company and cross the man’s palm with the coin he demands for his work.”

She scooped the necklace out of his palm and held it close.  “That is a wonderful idea.  I know you’re worried about the dangers of Beladine raiders, but I’d love to visit more of the towns and villages under Saggara’s protection.”

He’d been reluctant to let her venture to Lakeside, convinced only by Anhuset’s promise to bring a small army as escort and the fact the town was within walking distance of the estate and redoubt.

Brishen lifted her hand, turning it one way and then the other.  “At least it wasn’t nettle dye,” he said and kissed her knuckles before leaving her for a much-needed bath.

He was right.  Nettle dye was green.  There were worse colors to sport than pink.

They met again for their supper in the great hall and afterwards in his chamber for another game of Butcher’s Covenant in which Brishen out-maneuvered her and slaughtered every man on her side of the board without losing more than three on his side.

“You’re getting better,” he said as she lay the intricately carved pieces into a silk lined boxed and closed the lid.

Ildiko snorted.  “That’s a lie and you know it.  Just when I think I’ve outsmarted you, you kill off one of my men.”

Brishen poured them both a goblet of wine from a nearby pitcher.  “You’ve outsmarted me on several occasions in the game.  Your weakness is you over-think your strategy and question yourself until you react instead of plan.”  He handed her one of the goblets along with a comb.  “You are, however, far better with a comb than you are with Butcher’s Covenant.”

Ildiko took the comb.  “That doesn’t comfort me.  One is an exercise in strategy, the other carding wool.”

He dropped down onto his haunches in front of her chair and tilted his head back to gaze at her.  “I am no sheep.”

She gathered his hair into a waterfall that spilled down his back and set to combing out the dark strands.  “Trust me, Brishen, no one with eyes will ever mistake you, or any Kai for that matter, for sheep.  More like wolves.”

Brishen sat passive before her, his wide shoulders slumped, his breathing slow as Ildiko glided the comb through his hair in long strokes.

“Tell me a tale,” she said.

It was their bargain.  She groomed his hair, and he told her stories of his childhood in Haradis.  Some were funny, others grim, though he told them in a matter-of-fact voice as if it was quite commonplace for  mothers to lash their children with a horsewhip because they had a slight lisp and couldn’t quite master one of the simple spells all Kai children learned.

Ildiko guessed Brishen had been rambunctious, resourceful and clever.  And he’d been born with a compassion and nobility of character neither of his parents possessed.

“What would you like to hear?” he asked.

She thought about it for a moment.  Her request was more for an answer to a question than a story of the past.  “Why are you nothing like the man who sired you and the woman who bore you?”

It was as if she touched him with a hot brand.  Brishen jerked forward, back stiff as a spear haft.  He gained his feet in one fluid motion and turned to Ildiko with his hand outstretched.  “Come with me,” he said.

She stared at him, then took his hand without question.  He led her through the manor, down to the first floor and out a door that led from a buttery to the bristling thicket of brambles and wild oranges that hemmed in one side of the estate.

A pale moon hung thin in the sky and did nothing to illuminate the earth below it.  Ildiko stumbled along behind Brishen, blind as a mole in daylight.  Her husband moved surefooted in the suffocating darkness, guiding Ildiko toward a destination she assumed would answer a question she was starting to regret asking.

They stopped before a patch of wall that surrounded part of the manor’s loggia.  Brishen uttered a word in a language Ildiko was certain couldn’t have been bast-Kai.  A shadow, paler than its siblings, parted from the stone, exposing a set of three indentions cut shallow in one of the masonry blocks.

Brishen placed the three fingers of his right hand into the depressions and whispered another arcane word.  Ildiko gasped as the block softened until it melted into the stones on either side of it, leaving an opening black and deep.

She almost batted his arm away when he reached inside the hollow.  For all she knew, something with teeth longer and sharper than a Kai’s lurked in that space.  Brishen didn’t hesitate and pulled out a small urn.  He faced Ildiko, gently cradling the urn.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The answer to your question.”

He lifted the lid.  For a moment nothing happened, then suddenly a feeble light no bigger than a dandelion puff and just as delicate floated upward until it hovered above its housing.

The glow of Brishen’s eyes provided the only illumination between them, but it was enough to gild the tiny light as it flickered and bobbed between them.  “My sister,” he said softly.  “Or her memory at least.”

Ildiko gasped softly.  His sister.  He’d never spoken of another sibling, only the indifferent brother she met briefly in Haradis.  Brishen’s revelation begged more questions, the first being why would his sibling’s mortem light be here at Saggara, hidden away by spellwork, instead of at Emlek where the Kai held the memories of their dead?

“She was never formally named, but I call her Anaknet.  I’d seen eleven seasons when she was born.”  The tiny mortem light floated toward him and balanced on the back of his hand.  “She was born with a club foot, an imperfect child and unacceptable to Secmis.  I thought her pretty.”

A sinking dread grew in Ildiko’s chest.  He would tell her something terrible, something to bind her insides into knots .  She was tempted to cover her ears, tell him to stop and apologize to him for asking her silly questions, but she stood silent before him and waited for this childhood tale to unfold.

“Secmis murdered her four days after her birth.  She broke her neck.  I saw her do it.”

“My gods,” Ildiko breathed, horrified at Secmis’s monstrous cruelty and the knowledge that Brishen, a young boy, had witnessed it.

Brishen continued, his voice flat and distant.  “Secmis is a mage-leech.  She gains power and long life from forbidden spellwork and the consumption of souls and memories.  She was old when my father was a child, though now she goes by a different name and claims lineage from another clan.”  Anaknet’s mortem light danced over his palm.

“I took Anaknet’s light and released her soul before my mother could steal both.  Anhuset and my old nurse Peret helped me with the lamentation and got me through the memory sickness.  Peret kept the light for me tucked away in the hollow of a birch tree in her sister’s garden.  When I was given Saggara, I brought Anaknet here.”

He coaxed the mortem light back into the urn, closed the lid and returned the vessel to its hiding place.  Different spells reformed the masonry block until it hardened, leaving only an expanse of blank wall.

Brishen faced Ildiko fully, and even through a vision compromised by darkness and tears, she still saw the sparks of red that danced in his eyes.  “I hate my mother, Ildiko,” he said in that same flat voice.  “Down to the marrow of my bones.  One day I will kill her.  She knows this.”  He looked at the place where the urn rested.  “Anaknet is why I am who I am, wife.  Because I refuse to become like the monstrosities who bore us.”

Ildiko sniffled and scraped her sleeve across her cheeks in the futile effort to staunch the flow of tears.  She reached out to Brishen, carefully, as if he were an injured animal caught in a trap.  He accepted her touch, and soon she was wrapped in his embrace.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed into his shoulder.  “So very sorry.”  She stroked his hair, holding him for what seemed like hours, listening to the rapid hammer of his heartbeat and the shallow breaths that sometimes verged on sorrowful moans.  The Kai didn’t weep, but they mourned just as deeply as humans.

When he finally stepped away from her, his eyes had lost their red sparks and Ildiko’s had dried of their tears.  She grasped one of his hands in both of hers.  “I swear I will take this knowledge to my deathbed, Brishen.”

One corner of his mouth turned up, and he meshed his fingers with hers.  “I know.  It’s why I told you.”

They walked back to the manor in silence just as a thin line of crimson spread across the far horizon to announce the dawn.   Sinhue greeted Ildiko at her door.  “Your Highness, are you unwell?”  She ushered her charge inside and made her sit on the bed while she poured water into a cup and handed it to her.  “This might help.  Do you need a cloth for your eyes?  They’re swollen and red.”

Ildiko sought and found the a partial lie to tell.  “I was crying.”  She hiccupped a giggle at Sinhue’s bewildered look.  “Humans weep when they’re sad.  I was missing my family.  I’m fine now, though I’ll take that cloth.”

By the time she’d bathed her hot face and changed into her nightrail, the sun had risen enough to turn the plains into a golden sea.  Ildiko slipped quietly into Brishen’s room and found him, still dressed, standing in a clot of shadows near the open window.  He stared eastward, into the blinding dawn and didn’t turn as she padded closer to him.

“Stop, Ildiko.”

Startled by the abrupt command, she halted.  “Brishen?”

A faint sigh, and his voice gentled.  “It will be best if you sleep in your bed alone today.”

An icy rush of hurt punched her in the gut.  She staggered inwardly for a moment, then righted herself.  This had nothing to do with her.  His recounting of his sister’s death had left her emotionally wrung out.  She suspected that for him it had torn open old wounds that had scabbed but never healed.  He wanted to tend them in isolation.

Solitude, however, wasn’t always the best comfort.  She eased another step forward.  “Are you sure you wish to be alone in your grief?”

His dry chuckle held no humor.  “If it were just grief, no.  I’d want you here.” He still refused to face her.  “I’m not only grieving, Ildiko.  I’m bitter; I’m angry and I’m lusting.”  His voice deepened on the last part of his declaration and sent Ildiko’s heartbeat into a gallop.  “Those emotions together offer nothing but misery and violence for both human and Kai.  It’s dangerous for you to be in here with me.  Go to your room.  I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”