The King's Blood (12 page)

Ciara leaned back on her heels, realizing she'd had her own teeth clenched the entire time. "That was it then?"

The witch looked balefully at her as she slipped on a pair of gloves boiling in a bag over the fire, "Of course not. That was just to clean the wound. Now the fun begins."

With the kind of adroit precision most pianists dream of, the witch began to suture muscle back to muscle while Ciara averted away from the gory mess, trying to find a distraction to keep her from vomiting all over the boy. Her eyes settled on his face, his eyes closed tight now as if he suffered a vivid nightmare. Getting your skin sewn up by a witch should probably count as one.

He wasn't a handsome chap, even being generous. His nose and ears far outflanked the rest of his features, making it look more like a nose with a face attached. Aldrin's jaw receded back so far it was a wonder he could even chew. Out of all the options in the kingdom, her father had to saddle her with this homely noble's brat. And why him, anyway? They could always sire more bastards; in fact, it was what they were mostly known for.

A clank pulled Ciara out of her revere and she watched a disturbing pair of tiny clamps plop into a metal tray, smearing blood where it fell. The witch stepped back from her handy work admiring the suturing, before draping a blanket across the boy. Her eyes lingered on the sunken face, one he was certain to grow into.

She turned sharply to Ciara as the girl asked, "Is he, will he die?"

The witch grinned, "We all die eventually." Ciara narrowed her eyes. "But today, I believe he shall live. Come."

Disentangling her fingers from Aldrin's, Ciara followed the witch to her hearth and, perhaps foolishly, accepted a mug of tea from the jangling hand.
 

"I am surprised to see a daughter of the sand traveling with the blood of the snow."

Ciara snorted, "I am no sandworm." It was always adults that called her that, usually when they were certain her father was out of range. Children were their own brand of cruel, forming pecking orders related to who could throw a stone the furthest or wore the fanciest tunic, until they learned proper hatred from their elders. "I was born and raised in Castle Albrant."

The witch nodded as if she were listening to something else, "You carry more of the dune's shameful power than you know."

"And for all I know, the only magical powers you have are to preserve bruised cherries for Soulmarch."

The witch smiled, but only the winter wind touched it, "Magic isn't something to be squandered performing parlor tricks for spoiled brats and their comatose princes."

Ciara's tongue got the better of her, even as her brain tried to scream about all the very sharp things scattered about this hut, "He's just some noble bastard, no prince. Certainly not mine."

The witch cast another eye upon her patient, watching the shallow rise of his ribcage. "No. Certainly not a bastard. But also certainly not yours. Perhaps you can ask him when he awakens."

"Maybe I will," she muttered under her breath. The witch seemed to know things, things Ciara began to suspect she was also supposed to know, and the woman used that as power against her. Perhaps that's all magic really was, knowing more than your audience.

Setting her own cup down softly, the witch returned to her large cauldron, stirring counter-clockwise. The movement bothered Ciara, the only other person she knew to stir to the left was Marna, right before she dumped all the soup on the floor for "bubbling at her." Over her shoulder the witch began, "Now, about my payment."

Ciara panicked. What little she had in her coin purse was marked for food and something resembling lodging. And everyone knew the witches always asked for more than you could ever give; it kept people beholden to them. The witch seemed to pay the girl no heed, still slowly stirring her pot, letting Ciara stew away in her chair. She banged the spoon once and picked up a bowl.

Ladling what was probably the last customer who couldn't pay into it, she started, "For giving life back to not your prince, I request that in three months time you stop at another witch's home."

Ciara froze. How could she make this deal? She was due in Tumbler's End before the first snowfall. "I.."

The witch passed her the bowl, filled mostly with an oily broth and a strange spice that tickled the nose if one got too close, "You will agree, of course. The other option is...not something you would like to explore. Now eat up. The two of you look as though you've been starving for weeks."

Without waiting for the girl to respond, the witch tipped the bowl back to her mouth. Ciara eyed her own dinner but followed suit, not surprised by the lack of dining ware in the cottage. It clung to her throat like a beefy sap, sliding down to a stomach that wasn't certain what to make of all this.
 

A pair of hazel eyes turned upon her then and watched silently, waiting. At first all Ciara felt was the warmth, then her eyes began to droop. She shook her head, trying to fight whatever potion the witch drugged her with, but it was too late. The sap wouldn't be denied as it seeped into her blood. She managed to crawl out of the chair before her body gave way and she tumbled to the floor.

"Rest," was all the witch said as she advanced upon the girl before Ciara's eyelids finally gave up the last of their fight.

CHAPTER EIGHT

S
tones older than his line creaked in the wind as he crossed the fetid threshold of the Viltuvian. Marciano snuggled deeper into his coat despite the still mild autumn air, it wasn't the wrath of nature he kitted himself against up here. He despised this pile of rock; an old ruin from the first Empire, broken and beaten during the Elven war. A set of jagged teeth grimacing above the capital city beneath it.

It was his own cursed life that the Emperor would favor here, some days holding court as the untamable wind ruffled and tossed about the elaborate wigs on the Viscounts heads, sending their manservants scattering after them. But Vasska barely noticed, as he paced about what had been the rotunda, his eyes always glancing heavenward as if he could see more than the crumbled stone of an imploded dome and a few industrious bird nests.

He'd spend hours, sometimes even endless days, pacing the old halls of previous Emperors, trying to absorb an ethereal power from the weed encrusted floors they walked to legitimize his own claim to the throne. His father's power grab had been tenuous at best; but the Aravingions, sick of the infighting from the previous families for the past regicide filled centuries, decided to see where this new line was going. No one expected the religious fervor of Emperor Vasska.

Marciano shifted his shoulders, the sack upon his back slipping down. It cost him nearly a hundred men to retrieve the cargo inside. He drew closer to the old senate floor encircled with gasping candles providing the only light to beat back the darkness and the siren call of the ruins for bandits who, for centuries, called it home until the Emperor had them all executed. Not for being bandits, killing a few peasants happens to everyone now and again, but for daring to sit their heretic bottoms upon the Holy Throne.

His Lord squatted over the small remnants of the mosaic-encrusted eras past on the floor, long since dug up and sold for scraps of bread and blades to dig up more mural bits. Only a tiny donkey head and a man who seemed to be scratching his own backside remained. Vasska mumbled to himself, "Yes, yes, that must have been here and," he dashed to the far right, "of course, the Scion of Pies rested here." An unraveled scroll followed him, the pictures almost entirely faded from age as his mind's eye filled in the missing pieces.

All Marciano espied of the splintered mural was more grass than god. He coughed politely into his fist. Vasska's head popped up, slipping back the royal hood his handlers insisted he wear while out playing so he didn't catch cold...again.

The Emperor was getting on in years, on the longer side of forty and with a few creases around his features to show for it, but he never appeared to age. Even in his young twenties, the man always moved and spoke as if he were facing down a midlife crisis. While most Emperors would lose their wild youth killing and bedding whatever crosses their path, he was on his knees praying away whatever sins he could conceive in his fervent brain. Some he was a bit hazy on, but coopering sounded wickedly awful. He'd confess to that one almost daily now.

He favored utility to fashion, swathing his lithe frame with rough linen vests and tunics, or an exceedingly plain robe at night. Most upon meeting the Emperor assumed it was all a big joke the Aravingions loved to pull. The man perched precariously upon the throne looked like your average neighbor yammering on about how the kids these days don't appreciate good Morris dancing, or perhaps a poor priest singing the tales of Argur and her great defeat of the pantheon in his one pig parish.

Vasska was completely ordinary, a pebble in a gravel pile, as forgettable as a noonrise, right until you looked him in the eye. It was like staring into a deceptively deep pool no light escaped from, only instead of your face reflecting back, it was your own sins in life. And he watched and judged them all. No one had ever been found worthy.

But killing was a sin, unless done in Argur's name. So the Emperor would laugh jovially at the foreign dignitaries who were certain the leader of all of the Aravs was really one of the priests who never left the man's side and not the worn face a foot beneath them. Later they would have terrible accidents, horse throwing a shoe, a runaway miller wheel, or a terrible case of falling on their own blade thirty times. Truly, Argur moves in mysterious ways.

The Emperor walked towards Marciano, his palace slippers kicking up some mosaic tiles, "What have you brought me, my good chum?"

Marciano dropped the bag and reached inside, his hands grasping a full head of grey hair. He passed the head to the Emperor who squealed a bit and cradled it like a newborn babe. "My Lord, I bring you the head of King Eldric. Your sworn enemy is no more."

Vasska giggled, a disturbingly high-pitched noise best left to mice and school children trying to frighten adults. He tilted the king's head towards his own and opened the eyelids. A sea of milky white answered back as the no-longer-king Eldric's pupils had rolled back. His fingers reached up to the dead eyes.

Please don't
, Marciano thought, trying to move as far away from his Lord as he could without taking a step.

But sure enough, Vasska pulled both eyes down until the grey sea stared up into his own, "It is written that one cannot know true victory until looking his enemy in the eye. Is that not true?"

Marciano tried to remain poised as the Emperor fondled the dead, "I wouldn't know, Sir. I always marked victory by the other sides death."

Vasska stared at him, those pools searching for a weakness, but Marciano faced this down many times whether knee deep on the battlefield or facing the encroaching army of the dessert tray at a state banquet. He knew his own heart and misdeeds and, while he tried to atone for them, he would not grovel for it. But the Emperor was in a jolly mood and broke off his penitence stare, "And that is why you are a soldier, Marciano, not a true leader as I am."

"Yes, Sir." And that soldier despised his lord's fondness for handling the heads of his enemies. From a lowly bootblack who got in his way up to Kings and Princes whose land got in his way, he wanted their heads. Wanted to stare into those dead eyes and, Argur, Marciano did not wish to know what his Lord got out of it.

Vasska scrambled off towards the shattered throne, the back long since scattered amongst the ground. The only part left was the stone seat, cracked in twain, upon which he set down the head still endlessly staring out into the vast ruins of a world the Ostero king never cared to know.

"Sir," Marciano interrupted the Emperor's musings, "there is a small problem."

Vasska looked up at him, his concentration broken from the head, "Oh? Well, out with it then."

"Neither of Eldric's sons were killed in the attack. There are wild reports that one of his kin was sighted escaping through the Northern Pass.
¹⁵
"

"Are there any more of his children?"

"Most of the daughters are married off already and unreachable, but not in line for the throne. There were reports of a younger son being in the castle, but he seemed to vanish into the shadows."

Vasska tapped his chin, lost in his own world, "Good, good."

"Not particularly good, Sir. If either of these boys makes it to the army before the spring to rally their allies, there will be little chance of our own men marching upon the fortified tower."

Vasska reached out a hand, eternally clammy and slightly limp. He touched Marciano's black armor gently. "You trouble yourself too much, General. Take a small company of men to flush out this supposed younger son. People do not vanish into the shadows. Argur sees all."

Marciano bowed, also trying to break any physical contact with his Lord, "Yes, Sir."

The Emperor walked slowly back to the head, picking it up and running his fingers through the blood matted hair. "Oh, and Marciano. Do not concern yourself with the older boy. Measures have already been put in place."