The Wayfarer King (5 page)

He groaned. This wasn’t how he’d meant to start his relationship with the lordover.

They were nearly at the inn when someone behind them screamed.

Aldras Gar
, the sword whispered in his mind.

Chapter 6

The following day was somber and cool, fitting for what had just transpired. A breeze tossed Brodas’s hair and billowed his tunic. A drop of rain tapped his head and another his face beneath his right eye, mixing with the tear that ran down his cheek. This should never have happened. Kinshield would pay for this, the bloody bastard. Brodas felt the conviction burn in his chest.

He knelt on a folded cloth laid on the mound of fresh dirt and brushed a few stray crumbs of soil from the flat stone marking Warrick’s grave. In his fist he clutched a gem, smooth and warmed by his touch, and concentrated on the task at hand.

“Otra kerven,” he whispered. He drew his trembling finger over the surface of the stone, spelling out
Warrick Rone Darktalon, beloved cousin and friend. I
n the path his finger made, a dark line appeared and deepened, seeming to burrow into the rock itself. “Good-bye, my cousin,” he said softly. “You were like a brother.” The only sons of twin mothers, he and Warrick had been born only four weeks apart and had been each other’s constant companion their entire lives. They were more than cousins bound by blood. They were friends bound by love. “I will avenge you. That’s my most solemn promise. I’ll have justice for your murder.” He wiped the drop clinging to his lashes before rising. Several paces away, the gravedigger leaned on the end of his shovel, respectfully bowing his head. Red came forward and took a long look at the grave marker before giving it his customary two-finger salute.

“Let’s go,” Brodas said. His steps fell heavy across the grass of the cemetery while his thoughts continued to circle the injustices perpetrated by not only Gavin Kinshield, but his entire family, all the way back to King Arek’s champion. Cirang waited by the horses and greeted him with a respectful bow.

“Do you need to send word to family members?” she asked.

Brodas supposed he should send a message to their mothers. That could wait. Now they needed to get away from Sohan before the Viragon Sisterhood found them. “Later,” he said as he climbed into the saddle. “Now we ride for Calsojourn. My former associate, Sithral Tyr, had a farmhouse near there.” He heeled his horse and pulled the collar of his shirt up to shield his neck from the cool gust that sent shivers across his skin.

“Is he there?” Red asked, riding up alongside Brodas. “We could use his help.”

“He’s dead,” Brodas snapped. He shouldn’t blame Red for not knowing these things; the battler had been away.

“Are you certain, my lord?” Cirang asked from his left.

Did she have no thought in her head? “You saw him leave my home with Brawna. Days later, she arrived at the Rune Cave with Kinshield and your fellow Sister, Daia Saberheart. Ask me again whether I’m certain.”

“Sorry, my lord.”

“My liege,” Brodas said. “I’m the rightful king, and I prefer you use the correct honorific when addressing me.”

“Sorry, my liege,” she said. Red smirked, and she shot him a seething glare. “What the hell are you smiling at, you ugly bastard?”

Brodas held up a hand. “The last thing I need is for you two to be at each other in a jealous feud. Red has seniority with me, Cirang. You’ll defer to him until you earn my respect. Red, don’t antagonize her. Honestly, must I treat you as children?”

“No, my liege,” Red said, though a trace of his derisive smile remained on his mouth.

They rode hard to reach Rheodry before nightfall. Brodas paid for a room for himself and one for Red and Cirang to share. If they were going to work together, they might as well start getting comfortable with each other. He undressed and lay abed, going over the recent events in his mind and trying to devise a plan that would put him within reach of the throne that should have been his.

“I claim the bed.” Brodas heard Cirang through the wall as easily as though there were no wall. “You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“I’ll arm wrestle you for it,” Red answered.

“You’d lose. I understand why you’re loyal to him,” she said more quietly. “He’s a powerful man, the kind who gets what he wants, but why does he think he’s the rightful king? He didn’t solve the runes.”

Brodas scowled indignantly, though he supposed it was a legitimate question. She didn’t know he was descended from King Arek’s cousin, a man who should have been the successor to the throne. No one did. Not yet.

“Don’t ask me, witless shrew. Ask him.”

“You just follow people blindly?”

“No more than you. What happened to his eyebrows?” Red asked.

“He was burned in the fight with Kinshield. If you’d been here, you’d have known.”

“If I’d been here, he wouldn’t’ve gotten burnt, you ugly sow.”

A few snappish remarks from Cirang were followed by a few crude comments from Red, then they seemed to settle into an agreement. Brodas was astonished when he realized the sounds that awoke him late into the night were those of the bed frame creaking and grunts of passion.
Red had better not be ravishing her,
he thought groggily. He could ill afford to have her storm away in anger or, worse, kill Red in his sleep. Brodas had few enough allies remaining as it was.

The following morning, he pulled Cirang aside while Red adjusted his mount’s tack. “Will the friction between you and Red prevent you from performing your duties?”

She cocked her head as though curious why he would ask. “No, my liege.”

“Then he didn’t force you last night?” Brodas asked.

One side of her mouth lifted. “Hardly.”

Once they were on the road again, Cirang and Red began to bicker over idiotic nonsense such as whose horse was kicking dust into whose face. “That’s enough,” Brodas said. “For the rest of this journey, you will both address me and only me. I won’t spend the next two days listening to you squabble.”

“Cirang thinks you don’t have any claim to the throne,” Red said.

“That’s not true, my liege,” she called from behind. “I was just asking is all. I never doubted it.”

Brodas waved dismissively. “It’s a fair question, one I expect to have to answer many times before the matter is resolved.” Cirang clicked her tongue and moved her horse to ride beside him. “As we know,” he began, “King Arek died in the year fourteen thirty-one without an heir. Arek was King Dantrak’s only surviving child, but few are aware that Dantrak’s brother had fathered a son and daughter. King Arek’s successor should have been his cousin Hent Engtury, but because of the conspiracy designed by Ronor Kinshield and Portulus Celónd, then Lordover Tern, Hent’s right of succession was denied.” Brodas didn’t see the point of mentioning Hent’s mental defect that supposedly prohibited him from ruling or even marrying, and that caused him to rape his sister, begetting his only child, a daughter. The way Brodas saw it, Hent’s daughter had the purest of blood. She had not one, but two parents descended from King Ivam. “My mother is descended from Arek’s grandfather, King Ivam, so rights to the crown fall to me.” Of course, Brodas’s mother wasn’t yet dead, but since she had no interest in claiming the throne for herself, she would abdicate to him anyway. Naturally, he had to secure what was his.

“I see,” she said with a thoughtful expression. “Don’t you have cousins or uncles who could make the same claim?”

“Quite possibly,” he admitted, “but I’m willing to challenge them for it. All my life, my mother has told me I’m next in line for the throne. I promised her I would claim what’s mine.”

“The people believe the rune solver is the rightful king,” she said. “How can you lead if no one will follow?”

“Despite what Ronor Kinshield claimed King Arek had said, the throne belongs to a descendant of the royal family, not some ignorant peasant who made a few lucky guesses. In time, I’ll make the people realize that Kinshield and Celónd had no right to invent that ludicrous law proclaiming the rune solver the true king in the first place. A couple of years ago, I hired a scholar to research my lineage. With those documents, I can prove proper succession. I merely need to get Gavin Kinshield out of the way first.”

“But if you’re the rightful heir and have proof of it,” Cirang said, “why not show your documents to the Council of Lordovers and have them declare you our monarch?”

Brodas didn’t expect a woman to understand these matters. Speaking slowly, as if to an idiot, he said, “Because as long as Gavin has the gems from the Rune Tablet, he gives legitimacy to the law that would declare him the king. If he couldn’t claim the throne, there would be no question who should sit upon it.”

Two days later they arrived at their destination. Though Sithral Tyr had called his shack a farmhouse, nothing had been cultivated on its surrounding acres for perhaps centuries. Weeds and grass had long ago taken over the field, and the dilapidated barn had only a partial roof, the rest caved in over years of neglect.

The one-room house was furnished with only a table, a single rickety stool, and a musty, bug-ridden pallet that Brodas had no intention of using. Without a hole in the ceiling, the shack couldn’t even accommodate a fire in winter. Even in the brightest hours of daylight with the door open wide, it was too dark to read without a lamp.

The original house had burned to the ground, but when Tyr discovered the hidden cellar beneath its ruins, and the treasures within, he built the shack over the cellar’s hatch and claimed the land by squatter’s rights. Among the abandoned items within the cellar, he’d discovered a journal that had once belonged to the infamous wizard Crigoth Sevae. Though the pages were frail and the ink faded, the information within was still quite legible. Brodas had managed to negotiate cheaply for it before Tyr fully understood its value. Over the course of several months, Brodas painstakingly copied the original text into one of his own journals to create a working copy for himself that he could read repeatedly without risking damage to the fragile tome.

They unloaded the horses and settled in. Cirang went around killing spiders and clearing away their webs while Red gathered wood for a cook fire. Brodas found an old candle, dug the burnt wick out of the wax and lighted it. With an assortment of quill pens, bottle of ink and his journals on the table, he sat and leafed through the journal he’d marked with the numeral one. He crossed out the first name on his list, then copied the location of Gavin’s brother’s house to a sheet of paper he ripped from the back of his current journal.

“Red and Cirang, I have a task for each of you.”

Chapter 7

Gavin ran up the street, back toward the city square, shouting at the fleeing citizens to make way, and they parted for him. He pulled on his leather glove as he ran. Daia shouted at him to wait, but he couldn’t. Not when his people were in danger.

“Please help,” an elderly man said as he hobbled toward Gavin. He stopped long enough to point in the direction from which he had come. “Beyonders. A dozen of them.”

Aldras Gar,
the sword whispered.

He reached behind his head and pulled the sword from its scabbard. In the hilt, the gems glowed with an inner light, brightening with every step he took. A foul stench grew stronger as he neared. The sounds of screaming became louder, as did the sounds of men shouting commands and curses.

He rounded the corner onto Barrel Street and came upon a horrific scene. Three of the lordover’s men-at-arms lay bloody and still on the ground. Gavin relaxed his vision but saw no hazes around their bodies. They were dead.

Three more soldiers were surrounded by six monsters, each about the size of a pony and stinking like a privy. Five of the beyonders were covered in tiny scales like a snake that shimmered a rainbow of color in the sunshine. Under any other circumstances, they might have been comely, but their fingerlike appendages dripped the blood of their victims, and their naked bodies were splattered with bits of human flesh.

The sixth was the tallest, similar in structure but gray and black, with eyes so terrible that even Gavin had to look away. That one came toward him, uttering a choking sound that he took for a laugh. He stepped into a battle stance and readied himself for the attack. Its five friends turned their attention to Gavin, giving the men-at-arms an opportunity to focus their attack on one. It fell with a horrific scream.