Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1) (23 page)

Anhuset hadn’t lied, but she hadn’t expounded either.  Brishen’s face, elegant, regal, and sublime by Kai standards, was swollen beyond recognition, mottled with bruises and cuts and washed in blood.  It streaked his cheeks in cracked black ribbons that ran from his hairline to his chin.  His mouth had been split multiple times, and the high bridge of his nose was crooked and swelled to twice its width.  His right eye had swollen shut, and where his left eye should have been; only a sunken eyelid over an empty socket remained.

She clapped a hand over her mouth but refused to close her eyes.  Bruises covered every part of his body she could see, and her gaze froze on his hands.  They hadn’t stopped with his eye.  Ildiko traced a delicate line over the back of his left hand.  The lethal claws that could split a man from gullet to navel yet tease her skin with the lightest touch, were ripped out, leaving behind only bloody, mangled nail beds.  His right hand matched his left.

Ildiko stroked the air just above his head with a trembling hand, afraid to touch him, afraid his beaten, brutalized body would disintegrate before her eyes.  She didn’t know what she wanted to do more—scream her anguish or shriek her rage.  “My poor love,” she whispered.  “Why?”

Serovek spoke behind her.  “We think the leader got away.  We slaughtered all but a half dozen who say they can tell us who hired them in exchange for mercy.  What do you wish to do, Highness?”

Ildiko stared at Brishen, at the shallow rise and fall of his chest as he breathed gurgling breaths.  He stank of blood and agony.  The wind lifted a strand of his hair, and she caught it between two fingers.  It stuck to her skin, matted with gore.  She didn’t care who hired animals to unleash their savagery.

“Kill them,” she said in a flat voice.  “Kill them all.”

*****

When they returned to Saggara, she sequestered herself in Brishen’s chamber and didn’t leave for four days.  She bathed there, ate there, and dressed there.  Except for brief dozing spells, she didn’t sleep there.

The small troop of healers who tended her husband came and went, each time assuring her that time, rest, and regular doses of marseret tisane would see him through his ordeal.  Ildiko found it ironic that the poison sap used to bring Anhuset low served a more merciful purpose in staving off Brishen’s pain.

He slept peacefully, his bandaged hands resting across his stomach.  More bandages covered the arrow wounds in his shoulder and legs.  Ildiko sat for hours in a chair next to the bed, content to watch him.  The swelling had slowly receded, and the blood and dirt were gone.  His right eyelid twitched as he slept.  The left she couldn’t see.  White cloth swathed that side of his face, hiding the deep cut that ran from below his lower lashes to the top curve of his cheekbone, testament to the brutality used when his captors cut out his eye.

Delirium didn’t plague him, and he drank the tisanes the healers coaxed on him without waking.  Ildiko read to him sometimes and ventured a song or two before her voice warbled too much to continue.  Anhuset often visited, updating him on the fortress’s daily activities as if he sat before her, awake and demanding a status.

She didn’t stay long.  Ildiko always knew when Anhuset was about to bolt from the chamber.   Her hands flexed on her sword pommel as if she wanted nothing more than to kill Brishen’s torturers a second time.  Ildiko knew exactly how she felt.

“You’ll send for me as soon as he wakes?”  The same question each time before Anhuset escaped.

“Of course,” Ildiko promised each time she asked.

No longer afraid to touch him, she caressed the unbandaged side of Brishen’s face.  Ildiko had once admired him, naked and glorious on his bed within a corona of golden sunlight, and thought him invulnerable.  How terribly wrong she had been.

“This should never have happened, Brishen.”  The inevitable, annoying tears threatened, and she blinked hard to force them back.  “We were unimportant, you and I.  We weren’t supposed to mean anything to anyone.”

A slow, deep sigh escaped his lips, and his right eyelid opened, revealing a glowing, lamplight gaze.  Brishen’s voice was hoarse from disuse but still clear.  “Woman of day,” he said slowly.  “You mean everything to me.”

No amount of blinking this time held back Ildiko’s tears.  They streamed down her cheeks to drip off her chin and onto Brishen’s shoulder.  “Prince of night,” she said in a watery voice that echoed another moment when she’d greeted him with the same words.  “You’ve come back to me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Brishen was a man who chose to see the good that came of any situation.  He had yet to find it with the loss of his eye, but he had discovered it with the loss of his claws.  While his recollection of his torture remained murky, his fingers still throbbed sometimes, as if the memory of a terrible pain had imbedded itself in his flesh.  The nailbeds had healed over the months, the claws slowly growing across the exposed skin.  They were still short—well below the quick—but lengthening and hardening every day.  He’d have a full set of scythes on both hands within a year.

For now though, he took advantage of his disadvantage by drawing invisible murals across his wife’s naked back and buttocks with his sensitive fingertips.

She lay on her stomach in his bed—their bed now—her head resting on her folded arms, her face partially shielded from his gaze by locks of red hair.  He lay recumbent beside her, sketching looping designs along the graceful indention of her spine, down to the pair of dimples that decorated her lower back.  Her skin pebbled under his touch, and a patch of muscle contracted involuntarily as his fingers glided over her body.

It was a sensual pleasure to touch her this way, a fine thing that sprang unexpectedly from brutality.  She was in no danger of being scratched or lacerated, and Brishen had discovered that fingers with short nails could do things that ones with claws could not.  Things that made Ildiko writhe in his arms and leave claw marks of her own on his shoulders.  If he didn’t depend on the martial edge his claws gave him, Brishen would keep his short for that reason alone.

Ildiko pushed her hair away to look at him.

“What?” he asked.  He’d stopped searching for revulsion in her gaze weeks ago.  There was none to be found.  Except for the sympathetic kisses she placed on his eyebrow and the flattened lid over his empty eye socket, she remained untroubled by his mutilated visage.

She watched him now with an expression softened by post-coital languor.  “I think I fell in love with you during our wedding.”

Her statement sent a rush of euphoria through Brishen that left him lightheaded.  His hand flattened on her back before sliding up between her shoulder blades to bury itself in her hair.  Her every action, every laugh, every caress spoke of her great affection for him, but this was the first time she said she loved him.  An upbringing in the Kai court had taught him to control his emotions.  A good thing too or he would snatch his wife into a hard embrace and accidently break every bone in her body.

He settled for hooking an arm under her side and dragging her closer to him.  “It took you that long?” he teased.  “You are difficult to win.  I tried very hard during our first meeting in the gardens.”

Ildiko sputtered.  Her leg slid between his knees, riding higher to rest against his thigh.  “Calling me a hag is not the best courtship gesture.”

“As I recall, you threatened to bash my skull in because of my appearance.  And that was when I was magnificent to behold.”  He wiggled his eyebrows at her.

His smile faded when she didn’t return it.  She traced the bony ridge of his cheekbone, fissured by scars inflicted by a knife.  “They took your eye, Brishen,” she said.  “Not your character.  You’re still magnificent.”

His control only went so far.  Brishen groaned and rolled to his back, taking Ildiko with him.  It was a long hour later before he peeled himself out of his wife’s embrace and kicked the blankets away from them both.

Ildiko grabbed for the closest sheet.  “What are you doing?”  Her skin glowed, washed a shade of pink similar to the bitter mollusk.  Brishen curled his clawless hands into fists to keep from caressing her and losing yet another hour.

He sat up and swung his legs to the floor.  “My mother will be here soon.”

Ildiko flopped back onto her pillow with a groan.  “Don’t remind me. I’ve already warned Sinhue to check the bedding and clothes chests in both rooms once she’s gone.”

He hadn’t been any more thrilled than Ildiko when a messenger from Haradis had arrived a week earlier to warn them of Secmis’s visit.  “At least she is only here for two nights.”

“Those will be the longest two nights of our lives.”

He couldn’t agree more.

They helped each other dress in the quiet of the chamber.  The halls below them were a hornet’s nest of frantic activity in preparation for the queen’s visit.  Brishen had wanted to tell his servants to leave Saggara and visit family, friends, anyone for a few days.  Secmis could fend for herself.  Ildiko had met that suggestion with an expression of nostril-flaring indignation.

“I will not be known as a rude, unwelcoming hostess,” she said in a voice that Anhuset told him later sounded exactly like when she ordered his captors’ executions.

Brishen had hidden his smile and backed quickly away from the idea.

He paused in lacing his tunic when Ildiko handed him the eye patch he wore outside their bedroom.  “I thought you didn’t like it when I wore this.”

The first time he’d tied it on, Ildiko had stepped back, alarmed.  “It makes you look vicious,” she said with a scowl.

He still hadn’t yet figured out how a mouth full of fangs or claw-tipped hands didn’t bother her anymore, but a harmless eyepatch did.  But he wished to please her and wore it only if they hosted guests or visited the villages and townships.

She shrugged.  “This is your mother.  She’ll approve.”

While Brishen had acceded to Ildiko’s wishes of tearing the fortress apart and putting it back together again for the queen’s visit, he refused to plan a greeting of great fanfare when she arrived.  If he didn’t think Secmis would try and take his other eye, he’d make her sleep in the stables.  Instead, his soldiers lined up in two parallel rows and saluted the queen with their swords as she rode through the gates with a modest entourage.

Brishen waited at the end, Ildiko on one side of him, Anhuset on the other.  His cousin spoke under her breath.  “If you order a dance and command me to attend, I will gut you in your sleep.”

Ildiko’s muffled laughter lightened the moment, and Brishen quirked a smile at Anhuset.  “No worries.  If I didn’t have to feed her, I wouldn’t.  Dancing would just invite her to stay longer.”

The visit was as excruciating as Ildiko predicted, but his unflappable wife persevered under Secmis’s contemptuous scrutiny and critical remarks.  In fact, she mostly ignored the queen, except when spoken to or to ask if her accommodations were comfortable.  Her focus centered on Brishen who counted the minutes until his mother finally left Saggara and left them in peace.

He didn’t ask her if the Beladine had tried to negotiate his release with her by forcing an annulment of his marriage.  And Secmis remained silent on the matter as well.  Her curious gaze took in his altered features and the way he’d balance a pitcher of wine against his glass before pouring.

The loss of his eye was not without consequence.  He was completely blind on his left side.  No flickers of movement or changing shades of light.  The first fortnight had been the most frustrating.  He couldn’t get out of the way of his own nose.  It filled his vision, large as a crane’s beak.  That had faded over time, but he still struggled with a sense of depth.

Walking up stairs presented a challenge with the first step, but the angle of his shadow aided him in sensing the changing depth and height of the steps.  Walking down was another matter.  His shadow fell straight in front of him, and the steps were nothing more than a smooth, sloping descent to his compromised vision.  He still kept one hand on the wall until he adjusted to the regularity of the treads’ rise and fall.

He refused to be an invalid, and as soon as the healers pronounced him well enough to leave his bed, he’d donned light armor and joined Anhuset in the practice arena.  His cousin treated his appearance as nothing out of the ordinary.  Her patience was long and her sympathy non-existent as she helped him to relearn the skills of combat as a one-eyed fighter.

Brishen mentioned none of this to Secmis.  He had no doubt she’d laughed when the Beladine had presented their threat to her.  Her younger son’s death was of little importance, his survival and recuperation even less so.

Patience finally worn away by Secmis’s constant haranguing, Ildiko had excused herself well before dawn and fled for the sanctuary of their chamber.  Brishen had let her go with a polite nod and cool bow.  If Secmis even sensed his affection for Ildiko, she’d make things difficult for them.

Secmis tapped a claw on the rim of her goblet and watched Ildiko disappear into the stairwell.  She turned to Brishen.  “So, has she taken your Beladine neighbor as her lover yet?”

He had wondered how long it would take for her to fire the first volley.  “No.”

She arched a doubtful eyebrow.  “Are you sure?  I’m told he is handsome to human women and even to some of the Kai.  And of course he has both of his eyes.”

Second volley, this time dipped in malice.  “I’m sure.”

Secmis frowned at his lack of reaction to her insults.  “You haven’t yet asked me why I’m here.”

Brishen shrugged.  “Saggara is part of your kingdom.  I’m its caretaker.  I assume you’re acting as the king’s emissary.”  Whatever reason for the visit, it wasn’t good.  He just had to wait until she revealed her purpose and brace for whatever impact it had.

She stretched in her chair, reminding him of a great cat—lithe, hungry, and ready to disembowel anything that moved.  “Maybe I just wish to visit my younger son.”

He gulped down a swallow of wine to prevent breaking into guffaws.

Secmis continued their one-sided conversation.  “Your claws are growing back.  You don’t seem any worse for your ordeal—other than the scar and being half blind.”  She spoke as if he’d taken a walk through the woods and stubbed his toe.  “I bear strong children,” she said.

When you’re not snapping their necks
, he thought but stayed silent.

Her self-satisfied smile changed, becoming something that sent a crawling chill down his back.  It took everything within him not to shrink away or leap from his seat when she stroked his forearm in a slow caress.  “It’s a shame you’re my son,” she purred.  “You would have made a magnificent consort.”

A surge of bile burned up his throat.  Brishen grabbed for the pitcher, braced it against his goblet and poured wine until it touched the brim.  He emptied the cup in two swallows.  “Why have you come, Your Majesty?”  Never before had he struggled so hard not to reveal his loathing for the woman who bore him.

Her knowing gaze warned he might not be as stoic as he hoped.  She reached into a pocket of her tunic and brought out a small decorative box.  She placed it on the table and slid it toward him.  He squelched the urge to push it back.

“I came to bring you this.  It’s yours.”  The queen gave a nonchalant shrug.  “I have no idea why it was sent to me.  It isn’t as if I would do anything with it.”  She stood, and he scrambled to stand with her and bow.  “You can wait to open it when your wife is with you.”

She swept around the table and signaled to the two handmaidens who hovered nearby, ready to serve her every whim.  “I’m not staying a second night,” she announced.  “Saggara lacks the most basic creature comforts.  Uncomfortable beds, boring food and even duller company.  No need to accompany me to the gates.  I’ll leave sooner without you and a dirty troop of soldiers following after me.  I’ll tell your father you send your regards.”

Two hours later, Brishen breathed a sigh of relief as Secmis and company disappeared into the horizon.  The journey would be hard-going for the riders.  The queen would shelter in a wagon shielded from the sun by dark curtains.  Her escort would have to ride hooded and squinting for several hours before they found relief.  He didn’t envy them.

He found Ildiko still dressed in her finery and standing at one of the windows in their room.  She turned to greet him with a smile.  “She chose not to stay?  Thank the gods!”  She literally skipped into his welcoming arms.  “I will never believe you are that woman’s son, bred and born.”

Unfortunately he was, but he’d succeeded in his endeavor to be nothing like her when others expressed their disbelief that they were in any way related.  His skin crawled again at the memory of her words.  “
Too bad you’re my son.  You would have made a magnificent consort.
”

“I’ve called for a bath,” he said.  “I need a good scrubbing.  Will you join me?”

Ildiko nodded eagerly and spied the box he held.  “What is that?”

“She said she came here to bring me this.”

Ildiko backed away from him.  “Maybe you should don your armor before you open it.”

He had a notion of what might be inside.  Secmis’s idea of humor was usually someone else’s idea of horror.  “I’ll open it later.”

Unfortunately, his wife’s curiosity couldn’t be quelled.  “Won’t you let me see?”

He sighed.  “I don’t think it will be pleasant, Ildiko.”

She frowned at him.  “Then you should definitely not open it alone.”

She had stood beside him through events far grimmer than opening a gift from Secmis and held her own.  She’d do so again.

Ildiko did wobble when Brishen opened the lid to reveal the box’s contents, and she clutched his arm.  “That bitch,” she breathed.  “That vile, horrible bitch.  She came all this way to sink a knife.”