The King's Blood (52 page)

But Medwin sighed, "Right and Wrong are only words when you have the balance of countries hanging in the wind."

Aldrin, raised on a less steady moral diet than the girl having a crisis of everything, stared into his hands. These were decisions better left to the ones in charge...like his brother. That thought disquieted him as he shifted in his seat.

"How did you know they'd fled to the Tower?" Aldrin asked Medwin, his mind trying to shift the conversation away from the broken god.

The old Chancellor smiled curtly, his fingers glancing across some of the oldest tomes in his wagon, "It is fabled to be impregnable, no invading army has ever claimed her. And..." he turned away from them, sliding carefully back to his desk as if years weighed upon his mind.
 

Gnarled fingers fumbled for the key tucked in his pocket, the only relic left from his old life that ended in fire and loss. A key to a library that was nothing more than ash in the wind. His blank stare snapped up as he gazed into the distance, "There is a prophecy."

Aldrin glanced at Ciara, who'd shaken off her mental destruction to cling to Medwin's words. A prophecy was little more than a way for unemployed soothsayers to pass time between their jobs flipping sausages. No one aside from the extremely crazy or the crazily bored put any thought into the prophetic stanzas flapping about inn outhouses and Soulday crackers.
 

Medwin crossed back to his desk, his hand slipping down to his hidden drawer, "I should have informed you of this when your talk of Cassandra and her sword began."

"Cassandra?" Aldrin mouthed to Ciara.
 

"Her?" she asked back.

Gently, Medwin extracted the book he kept hidden in the heart of his desk, always at the center of his research even if everyone else would pass it off as little more than fantasy. "The mighty hero Casamir did in fact exist. Or at least the meat of him did. Some of his more elaborate and recent stories seem to have been culled from other less popular heroes. But he was not as you know him."

Ciara rose, walking cautiously towards the man who was letting her into the most guarded secret of his life. The book he pushed into her palm was missing most of its cover; only a scrap of leather coated the spine. Umber pages marked the tome as "The Death of Cas" written in a calligraphic hand overtop a faded two word phrase that was impossible to make out anymore.

"Casamir was a woman, a very demanding woman, who preferred the name of Cas," Medwin began, synopsizing the book in her hands, "And that is how she died."

Ciara's fingers carefully crested the pages, some of which were black and charred on the edges. A faint whiff of charcoal floated up from within. Phrases jumped out at her about a woman named Penny and an idiot named Jack. But mostly there was an as large as life woman who seemed to despise everyone she ran into, forced into situations she fought her way out of.

Aldrin fielded the most important question on this discovery, "Does that mean Humphrey wasn't real?"

Medwin chuckled, "No, he was mentioned quite heavily in her adventures. There are some who believed he was, in fact, her husband, but...let us say there is little evidence."

Sure enough, beneath Ciara's fingers were tales of a gentle giant thumping their narrator lovingly on the head and then cracking wise with a goblin of all things. Chud was a strange name for such a creature.

"And the dragon, the frost dragon," Aldrin seemed in a near panic over the thought of his house's crest, the symbol upon which rested everything the Osteros claimed, being little more than the imagination of a bard with access to more paper than sense.

"Now that is a strange one. There are numerous references to the deed but none that actually tell the tale. It seems to have been lost to the sands of time," Medwin's scholastic interests shone through as his voice grew contemplative and lively.
 

Ciara gently closed the book, her palm covering it protectively, "So? This has what to do with a prophecy?"

Medwin's eyes shifted down as he seemed to open his heart and life to the teenagers he took under his wings, "I...much of my life has been spent tracking down the tales of Cas and her 'merry band of idiots.'" He smiled wistfully, his mind decades past, "She always loved that tale, Analia was her favorite."

Ciara glanced down at the name inked into the margins of the book in her hand. A small name, written in oversized letters with the i dotted by a heart, graced the bottom. "Proudly Owned By Karlita."
 

"In my research," Medwin continued, "I stumbled across a prophecy, never fully finished in any of the books. One had to be looking for it to find it."

Medwin stood tall, placing his hands behind his back as he recited from memory,

"'On the Summer's Day,
 

At the fall of mankind

And the rise of reason

After seven score and thirteen years

The magic will return.'"

"Magic," Ciara cursed. It was quickly becoming the oatmeal in her hair.

The face, scarred by magical fire turned to the girl and nodded solemnly. He spent much of his life responding the way she did. "And the threat of the rise of magic, that others could succumb to the same loss that I did, drove me to track this prophecy. It was years before another Casamir book fell into my lap, another ancient one written by Jack.

'The Tower of the North

In the Land of the Dragon Slayer

Gather The Points of Arda

And Slice the Magic Free'"

Aldrin looked over at Ciara, the symbolism and third or fourth translations clearly obscuring something important, but all he got out of it was that magic was going to be sliced by a bunch of toast points, perhaps for brunch. She kept staring down at that small book in her fingers, trying to not think about her father.

"I found it most curious that it was only in books clearly printed before the great fall that this prophecy appeared," Medwin muttered to himself.

"Why?" Ciara asked, breaking from her repose.

"Because magic wasn't broken from Arda until the war with the elves. Whoever created this prophecy specifically hunted out and used books prior to the war and the, um, literary sex change Cas underwent."

Ciara nodded along, not caring about the historical implications, "So, what does that mean for us?"

Aldrin looked up at her, "We head for the Tower of Ashar."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"
H
ello, Nightingale."
 

The voice was smooth and rehearsed, as if she didn't just catch him with his proverbial pants down. Taban smiled up at the girl, her arms crossed in protection from a magic she began to fear more than Isa's sparks.

"What are you doing?" She was exhausted from a night of scrubbing more bowls and pots than she thought imaginable or necessary to cook up oatmeal and bread. And then the priest and witch, still arguing over man's inhumanity to man and which god would win in a battle against a forty foot wide jelly, dumped enough bandages and emptied flasks into her unwanting arms to keep her up another five hours.

Aldrin tried to assist, but after he smashed the fifth bottle she sent him back to baby-sit Mitrione, who was railing as if it were the end of the world and screaming that his liver was on fire. She had no way to prove that he'd broken the bottles on purpose to get out of the mountains of work, but even the Bothers eyed the prince suspiciously, wishing they'd tried the same maneuver.
 

Now, with most of the Historians curled up in their beds, dreaming the dreams of heroes riding in on white sails to rescue a town, Ciara picked lonely amongst the silent wagons, trying to keep her wandering thoughts at bay. As she checked under the wheels of Dean's wagon for any stray badgers or other wildlife he'd been idiotically feeding, she caught sight of a pair of leather legs walking purposefully into the camp.

She'd followed silently behind as the assassin rather daringly reached his palms into their winnowing food stores and helped himself to a handful of grain. Summoning from her genes the generations of women who regularly caught their underlings with the hand in the cookie jar, she demanded, "What do you think you're doing?"

The smile on Taban could disarm a country in the grips of a cold war. Ciara merely shifted and crossed her arms deeper until her hands were lost in the folds of her dress.
 

"I am borrowing some grain. It turns out the wildlife in this besotted section of the world goes mad for your 'gourmet cooking.'"

"Borrowing implies you intend to return it," Ciara pointed out.

"I could if you'd like. Most of the prey does not get to the point of consuming it. Though there is a heady mix of dirt and poison mixed in."

"I doubt any of the men here would notice," she commented flippantly, earning a smile from the assassin.

Taban still pocketed the oats in his coat; hunting was growing more desperate the higher north they traveled. "Oh yes, I almost slipped my mind," he said quickly, his excitement for once failing his near perfect grasp of Ostero colloquialisms, "I still have your little knife." He reached into his pockets and removed her very familiar dagger, the handle freshly oiled and the blade whetted.
 

Ciara took it gladly from him, her fingers excited to find their old friend.
 

"It fell from your body after you took a small nap," he said, playing her brush with death as little more than an inconvenience.
 

"I...thank you," she said sincerely, her fingertips dancing upon the much missed and very beloved three circles. It made her heart ache for a moment, a reminder that this may be all that was left of the home she lost.

Taban's lion eyes crinkled as he stood slowly, trying to disguise the power of his limbs, "You carry a relic of the Adherents of the Triad. Very surprising."

Despite herself, Ciara admitted to him, "It was my father's. Why is it surprising?"

The smile faded as he touched his freshly shorn chin, more than likely thanks to a pilfered Historian's razor, "You do not know of the Adherents?"

Ciara shook her head. Her father was an expert at deflecting any questions about his past. Not that his offspring were very curious. It was rare for children to think there was ever a world prior to their birth.

"Surely you know of the Triad," he said as if talking to a five-year-old fresh off her first day at school.

Growing more annoyed at the man who'd saved her life too many times, she shook her head more pointedly. The only things she knew about Dunner culture was the everything was really spicy and there was a great fear of chairs.
 

"Your father taught you nothing of your skin," Taban muttered angrily.
 

"My skin is my own," she flared back, tried of apologizing for failing to live up to everyone's demands of her.

But the assassin shook his head, "No ones skin is their own. We owe it to our parents, our Lord, and our God," then the smile returned as he flirted through a side grin, "and our creditors, which sometimes happen to be all three."

"I don't want to know what you'd have to have done to owe your gods," she said, emphasizing the final s.
 

"Sometimes it's as simple as finding an apple in a field of snow. The only ones who take a greater claim for such shallow rewards are witches...or priests," he waved his arms up above his head as if he were praising to his Lord, or God, or Creditor on high. As the cuff of his armband slipped down, a very familiar mark shined free. A rare burst of white on the rich black of his wrist, it was a series of dots that created the letters azu. She'd seen this tattoo many times before.

Taban followed her line of sight and gripped the mark with his other hand, hiding it from sight, "Ah, ah, that is not for the unbeliever's eyes."

"Then why get it on your wrist?" Ciara argued against centuries of cult tradition.

The assassin pulled up his cuff but still kept the old mark beneath his hand, "I suppose the other brothers would not enjoy greeting each other with bare buttocks."

Ciara rolled her eyes and turned away. She didn't want to hear more about this Triad and Adherents and Cults and familiar tattoos, but...it ate up at her. That this random stranger from a land so far flung it may as well be the moon, knew more of her father's life than she ever did.
 

The assassin seemed to sense this, rocking back on his heels as if he'd knocked over the entire bag of wax.
³⁸
He smiled, his teeth at nearly half moon as he said, "And now you're wondering just what kind of horrible atrocities did this secret cult of Adherents with brands and daggers get up to, yes?"

She didn't look back at him, only nodded cautiously and then, lowering her shoulders, said, "Yes."

"Oh, now, little bird, no need to carry on so. It's not as bad as you fear. We weren't founded to terrorize shop keeps or pillage widows. Very little robbing, from either the rich or the poor."

"Just wandering academics," she said.

Taban laughed harshly, "I never said we were not opportunistic when the need arouse. No, to understand the Adherents you must first know of the Triad."