Chapter 39
39
T HE KING’S brIGHT son stood in shadows.
Mikaen paused on the dark stairs that delved through the ramparts of Highmount. He stared out an arrow slit that afforded a view to the north, to the smoldering ruins of the city’s mooring docks.
It had been three days since the craven attack on the defenseless sprawl of wyndships. Still, a pall hung over the field, like a shawl of mourning. Hundreds had burned to death, thousands more maimed. Innocents all. Past the smoke, the towering warships loomed high, waving flags of the sun and crown.
At least those ships had been spared, and thankfully so.
Mikaen settled a palm on the pommel of his sword.
War is now certain with the Klashe.
His anger stoked higher. It was not the homecoming he had hoped. He still wore the ceremonial garb from his celebratory nuptial parade. The procession of knights, nobles, and servitors had traveled from Azantiia to the Carcassa family estate in the western stretches of the Brauelands. He had left his new wife, Lady Myella, at Hold Carcassia, a sweeping manor that spread across green hills. Its rolling low roofs were sodded in the same grasses that fed their vast herds. Rumors of war had been the pretext for securing Myella at the ranchhold, to shelter her out of harm’s way. But in fact, the sojourn had already been planned, to help mask how quickly her belly grew with the prince’s child, the future heir to the throne of Hálendii.
He closed his eyes against the pall outside and thought instead of holding his child in his arms. He pictured a crown of curled blond hair to match his own, and the bright emerald eyes of his beloved Myella. Already a paternal protectiveness warmed through him. He would let nothing happen to his child.
“We should not tarry,” Liege General Haddan urged from a few steps below. “The king awaits. And fury has quickened his temper.”
Mikaen nodded his understanding. After hearing of the Klashean attack, he had ridden hard back to Highmount, arriving with the dawn bell. His polished black boots were scuffed by stirrup and horsehair, his dark blue cloak carried half the road’s mud on it, and his body stank of sweat, both his and his steed’s. As soon as he had stabled his horse to be curried and cooled, he had climbed toward a cold bath and a welcome steam in the Legionary’s bathiery, ready to rid the trail from his pores and cracks.
Before he could even strip off his cloak, Haddan had appeared with his father’s summons. Knowing it could not be refused, nor even delayed, Mikaen had headed straight back down through the ramparts with Haddan.
And they still had much farther to go.
Mikaen followed the stone-faced Haddan around and around the stairs, past where he had stabled his horse, and deeper again, going from mortared stone to raw rock. Finally, they reached a landing and a section of wall that looked no different than the rest. A crack hid a hole that Haddan unlocked with a black key. The liege general shoved a narrow door open and stepped across the threshold.
“Hurry now,” Haddan commanded gruffly.
Mikaen followed and pushed the door closed behind him. They strode down a long hall that sloped even deeper. Mikaen kept his head ducked low, sensing the weight of the ramparts over his head. No smoky torches lit their path, only softly glowing veins in the rock wall. It cast Haddan’s shaved pate into a sickly pallor.
Mikaen hated coming down into the Shrivenkeep, but he understood the necessity of secrets buried deep and how some dark knowledge was best locked away from the brightness of the Father Above.
At last, an open doorway appeared, framed in firelight.
Haddan increased his pace, seemingly as happy to abandon this hall as the prince. Or maybe it was the pull of what awaited ahead. Past the ebonwood door, a cavernous domed space opened up. Its obsidian walls had been fractured into a thousand mirrored surfaces, reflecting the ring of torches flickering before other ebonwood doors, all sealed, except for the one behind Mikaen and another to the right, where two figures waited.
Haddan rushed forward and bent a knee, bowing his head. “Your Majesty.”
Mikaen trailed him, but only by a breath. He dropped to the same knee. “Father, I’m sorry to have arrived so late after such a cowardly attack upon us all. I should have been here.”
King Toranth waved them both up. “It gladdens me to have you back at Highmount, Mikaen.”
The prince regained his feet. His father’s expression did not look gladdened. The white marble of his skin was ashen, nearly gray. His brow lay in deep furrows, shadowing his blue eyes into a storm. He had even shed the finery of his embroidery and velvets and wore a legionnaire’s boots and thin underleathers, creased at knee and elbow. It was a knight’s habiliment, one put on before he donned his armor. The only adornment was a simple dark blue tunic over his leathers, emblazoned with the Massif house sigil.
Here was a highking readying for war.
Mikaen appreciated his father’s garb and hard countenance. He could see the storm clouds building around the man’s shoulders—and made a silent promise.
I will do all in my power to be the bright lightning to your great thunder.
The king turned to the other waiting beside him, a figure who had haunted his father’s shadow for as long as Mikaen could remember. The Shrive’s tattoo-banded eyes stared hard at the prince, as if irritated by his intrusion here—until the king spoke.
“Wryth, take us to the prisoner. We’ve given Vythaas long enough to prepare.”
The Shrive bowed and turned toward the door behind him. “He should be ready when we get there, especially as we still have a ways to travel.”
The king and the general followed Wryth. Mikaen took a deep breath while no one was looking before heading after them. He had never been farther than this threshold into the Shrivenkeep, and he had hoped never to do so. He was the prince who shone best under the sun, helmed in bright armor. The clash of steel and ring of shields were his music. He preferred to leave such dark places to the creatures who shunned the Father Above. Its halls were said to be shivered by screams, both from the throats of men and those of daemons.
Still, he followed the others past the door and into the bowels of the Shrivenkeep. Wryth paused beyond the threshold to unhook a glowing lamp from the wall. It was quickly needed. The torches grew scarcer as Wryth led them farther and farther. They passed down narrow stairs worn at the edges by centuries of Shrive’s sandals. Every passageway was more crooked than the last.
In the upper levels, they swept past gray-robed Shriven who ducked out of their way, clutching dusty texts to their chests, likely forbidden tomes from the Black Librarie of the Anathema. One Shrive they passed had a hand wrapped in bloody bandages, being led by another, suggesting an experiment gone awry.
Eventually, as they delved deeper, the passageways emptied of Wryth’s brethren.
Mikaen’s ears strained for any screams, for daemonic howls, but instead there was a hushed silence, which grew to be as weighty as the stone overhead. His nose caught a faint whiff of sulfurous brimstan, which their group seemed to be following, like a thylassaur on a blood trail.
The source finally appeared down a long serpentine tunnel. Near its end, the passageway was riven by a steep-sided ravine, as if the god Nethyn had cleaved it open with his obsidian blade. A stone bridge spanned it, flanked by two black pillars.
Wryth led them toward those stone columns. As Mikaen followed, he saw a crimson asp, crowned in thorns, curled on each pillar. The two horn’d snaken faced each other, as if daring anyone to trespass between them, clearly marking the territory ahead as the domain of the dark god ?reyk, and thus the Iflelen.
Mikaen hurried past those dead-eyed serpents and across the stone bridge. He made the mistake of looking over its edge. The chasm stank so heavily of brimstan that it turned his stomach and watered his eyes. Still, he spotted a baleful shine far below. It was not the ruddy cheer of a fiery hearth, but the same sickly emerald of the glowing seams that ran through the black stones.
He shuddered and rushed the last of the way across the bridge, joining the others who gathered under an archway into a large tunnel. The stone of the arch was scribed with arcane symbols, all glowing that abhorrent green, as if the very veins of the rock had been bent to the will of the Iflelen to form those symbols.
Mikaen balked at that threshold.
“It is not far from here,” Wryth offered, as if sensing Mikaen was near to bolting.
The Shrive headed under the archway with his lamp. His father and Haddan followed, which left Mikaen no choice but to continue after them. He certainly had no idea how to get back on his own.
Finally, Wryth reached an iron door. He hung his lamp next to it and grabbed the door’s circular hasp—a ring shaped like a curled asp—in both hands. It seemed to take all of his strength to pull it open. As the heavy door swung on oiled hinges, fiery light flowed out to them—along with a scream that burst into the hall and echoed away, as if trying to escape.
Mikaen shivered, knowing that the cry had come from no daemon, but from someone being broken.
Wryth waved them inside and trailed in afterward.
Mikaen’s view was blocked by the broad back of Haddan, until the liege general stumbled aside with a grunt of shock. The entire chamber looked made of hammered iron, as if they’d stepped into an oven. Only the metal riveted to all the surfaces appeared blacker than any iron. At the back, flames roared from a small barred hearth.
A chair of the same iron stood in the center. Beside it, the withered form of Shrive Vythaas greeted the king silently, then bent over a spread of silvery tools atop a nearby table. The instruments were all sharp-pointed or bladed or spiraled like an awl. Many of them were wet with blood. But it was none of this that drained the heat from Mikaen’s body and left him icy with dread.
A naked woman sat in the chair, her forehead, neck, and chest secured to its back by leather straps. She hung slack in her bonds, as if she had passed out from whatever made her scream. Her head was shaven, recently from the pile of white braids left on the floor. Rivulets of blood ran down her cheeks and pooled in the hollow of her exposed neck, before spilling again down her chest.
But worst of all was the top of her head. From her skull, a half dozen copper needles stuck out. As Mikaen watched, Vythaas crossed around his table to the back of her chair. The Shrive leaned over his captive, lifted his hands, and sank another copper sliver, as long as Mikaen’s outstretched fingers, through a hole freshly drilled through scalp and bone.
Mikaen pictured that needle sinking deep into the woman’s brain.
What is that bastard doing?
Even the king looked aghast, turning wide eyes on Wryth. “What is the meaning of this?”
Wryth lifted a hand, asking for patience. “Prioress Ghyle has proven far more stubborn than we anticipated.”
M IKAEN PACED THE room as Wryth and Vythaas finished some final preparations with the trussed-up mistress of the Cloistery. They measured the copper needles in her skull, shifted each incrementally, whispering together.
Mikaen kept his arms folded over his chest, trying to hold in his horror, to mask any sign of shock or fright in front of his father and the liege general. He smelled the blood, even the pool of piss under the chair that torture had wracked out of the woman. His tongue tasted the bitter alchymicals burning in the flames of the hearth.
He kept his gaze away from the chair. He knew Anskar vy Donn, the head of the detachment of Vyrllian Guards, had returned from the swamps, both furious and empty-handed. As best Mikaen could understand, his brother, Kanthe, had absconded with the girl who had miraculously survived the bat’s poison.
Brother, what mischief have you entangled yourself in?
It was a question that needed answering. Anskar suspected there was more afoot, plots within schemes. So, he had returned with the school’s prioress in hand, believing she knew more than she would admit to him. To get answers, he brought her before the king.
Mikaen swallowed and looked at the bloody woman.
And my father gave her to the Iflelen.
Wryth seemed to note all their distress. “As stubborn as Prioress Ghyle has been, I fear this is the only way to make her talk. And with our mooring docks smoking and rumors of ships massing along the coasts of the Klashe, we dare not dally with ordinary methods of inquiry.”
“But what is this that you’re doing?” Toranth gasped out, motioning across the breadth of the room.
“It’s a technique honed by Vythaas but derived from centuries of study.” Wryth turned to his fellow Shrive. “Are you ready? Can you demonstrate?”
Vythaas gave a small bow of his head and crossed back to the table. He picked up a coppery box, which had the same needles poking out of it, though each ended in a puff of feathery filaments so fine they appeared more like soft down. He thumbed a small lever on one side and a low hum rose from the box.
The noise spread around the room and grew sharper, trapped between the chamber’s iron walls. In another breath, its edges grew as sharp as the finest blade, yet toothed like a saw. It scratched at his ears, stabbed into his skull. Even Haddan winced, and Mikaen had once watched the man sew a sword slice across his own thigh without a flinch, even laughing while he set needle to flesh.
The tiny tufted filaments began to glow faintly, with the very air seeming to shiver around those tips. And still the keening rose higher.
A pained gasp drew Mikaen’s attention to the woman. The prioress’s eyes were stretched open but appeared blind, her mouth twisted in a rictus of agony. The needles sprouting from her scalp now shone with the same glow as the filaments from the box. Their lengths looked to be shivering in her skull.
Vythaas studied her reaction until the woman’s expression went slack, succumbing to whatever magick was employed here. Still, her brow remained beaded with sweat, like juice squeezed out of the flesh of a plum. Somewhere inside, she clearly labored against this assault.
Vythaas nodded to Wryth.
The Shrive turned to King Toranth, speaking louder to be heard past the screaming of the copper box. “Sire, you may now ask any questions you wish. She will not be able to refuse.” He waved to the prioress. “Her will is suppressed, leaving no space for lies.”
“But how…?” Toranth asked, his gaze sickly but also fascinated.
Wryth sighed, clearly seeking a way to explain to those who were not steeped in Shriven knowledge. He finally settled upon an explanation. “You are familiar with bridle-song, are you not? How some have the talent to lull the simplest of beasts and sway them to do their bidding. What we do here is much like that, using sound, heat, and vibration through the air to strip others of their will and force them to bow to ours.”
Haddan’s voice roughened with amazement. “So, with this method, you’re able to imitate or mock bridle-song?”
Mikaen felt none of the general’s appreciation. It’s not a mock of bridle-song, but a foul mockery of it.
“Indeed.” Wryth turned to the king and waved toward the prioress. “Ask what you wish to know.”
The king stepped forward, wincing at the noise as he drew nearer to the chair. “Prioress Ghyle, what role did you play in the disappearance of my son Kanthe?”
Those dull eyes found the strength to shift and settle on Toranth. Her cracked lips parted. “I… told him. A… A great danger comes. Moonfall… it will end all.”
Mikaen noted the king’s shoulders rise. He knew how much store his father placed in portents of the future. Toranth kept as many soothers and bone-tossers in his palacio as he did pleasure serfs.
“Who speaks of such doom?” Toranth asked.
“Al… chymist Frell. He calibrated… stars. And another, too…”
“Who?”
“A girl… Nyx… heard in warnings from the cries of Myr bats.”
Haddan scoffed loudly.
The king waved him silent.
Wryth shrugged. “True or not, the prioress believes it. She cannot lie.”
Haddan still was having none of it. If the general couldn’t strike it with a sword, he didn’t believe it existed. “Prioress Ghyle was born in the Southern Klashe, which means she has deep family roots there. Mayhap this is some plot seeded into her by our enemy, to sow discord. Spreading rumors of doom in a time of war will weaken convictions when we’ll need them at their strongest. Look what it’s already done to your son, sire.”
Toranth scowled. “What does any of this have to do with Kanthe?”
The question was directed at Haddan, but the prioress heard and could not stop from answering. Her brow ran with sweat as she clearly fought this bridling. “He… seeks to help… his sister.”
Mikaen stiffened, unfolding his arms. “Sister?”
“The girl who speaks for the Myr… she… is Marayn’s… Marayn’s lost daughter.”
Mikaen did not understand, but his father clearly did. He stumbled away from the woman’s words.
“No…” the king moaned. “It cannot be.”
Toranth swung to Wryth, who looked equally shocked.
“You said the babe was dead,” the king accused.
“So we all believed,” Wryth answered, but his expression grew shadowed.
Toranth’s face darkened with fury. “A child you portended, Wryth. A girl, just as you prophesied. One who would end the Crown, and with it, the world.”
Mikaen knit his father’s words together, building the fabric of the tale of the Forsworn Knight. He and Kanthe had whispered such chilling rumors of their family’s secret history, nestled under their bedsheets at night, when they were still boon companions, before being separated between Kepenhill and the Legionary.
Haddan’s expression remained skeptical. “More likely the girl is nothing but a ploy of the Klashe, to sway a second-born prince to pair with a supposed daughter of the king, to use such stories to stir insurrection against the true heir.”
The general glanced back to Mikaen, who in turn pictured the small bump in Lady Myella’s belly.
“Even if she is Marayn’s lost daughter,” Toranth countered, “we don’t even know if the girl is of my loins or the traitor Graylin’s.”
Their discussion was interrupted by a pained cry from the chair. The prioress struggled against her bonds, her arms yanking at the cuffs that bound her wrists to the chair. Still, she could not stop the words from escaping her throat.
“Graylin… Graylin goes to her even now,” she gasped out. “To Havensfayre.”
The king swung back to her with a bellow. “What?”
Vythaas brought the copper box closer to the chair, clearly trying to grind the woman back under his thumb.
Mikaen knew from Anskar’s report that Kanthe and the others had fled up the Path of the Fallen. No one knew if they had survived such a climb, as Anskar’s men had been driven back by some scourge rooted there. Still, if Kanthe had made it to Cloudreach, his most likely goal would be to reach the woodland trading post of Havensfayre. There was nothing else up there. Knowing that, the king had already ordered a warship to be readied for a flight up to Cloudreach to scout for the missing prince.
Mikaen watched his father sag, as if he were a punctured wyndship. He knew how much the king had loved Graylin, a friend from his earliest years. Toranth had punished the oathbreaker but spared his life, banishing him instead. Everyone had thought the Forsworn Knight had died in exile.
Apparently not.
And if not, Graylin was proving himself to be an oathbreaker once again. He swore never to return to Hálendii, to never set a boot upon the kingdom’s soil.
Even Haddan recognized how mercy could bite you in the arse. “Can there be any doubt that insurrection is being stoked? The king’s son, a suspected daughter, and now a disgraced knight of the realm returned. They must be stopped before this rancor spreads and roots deeper.”
Toranth nodded, his face hardening with the general’s passion.
Wryth, though, was not done with their prisoner. He crossed closer. His eyes narrowed, watching her continued thrashing. Vythaas closed on her other side with his accursed screaming box.
“What are you fighting not to tell us, Prioress Ghyle?” he asked coldly.
Her eyes rolled back, showing only white. Froth flecked her lips, which stretched to lines of agony. Still, the copper needles glowed even brighter, stabbing deeper into her will.
She screamed, returning to her native tongue. Klashean words burst from her pained throat. “Vyk dyre Rha!… Vyk dyre Rha se shan benya!”
Wryth rocked back a step. Vythaas shuddered, almost losing hold of the copper box. He fumbled to keep hold of it—but it was enough for the prioress to regain herself.
Her eyes snapped to center. Pain turned to fury. She yanked an arm free of its cuff, ripping skin. She lunged out and snatched a long blade from the nearby table. Before anyone could stop her, she plunged the knife into her throat.
Wryth grabbed for her hand, but she twisted the blade and yanked it back out with a great fountain of blood. She stared with such hatred that the Shrive fell back a step.
Then in a few hard breaths, life faded from those eyes.
The king grabbed Wryth by the shoulder. “What did she say at the end? What did she mean?”
“I don’t know,” Wryth said. “Just nonsense churned up as she fought to free her will. She clearly did not want us to know more.”
Mikaen suspected the Shrive was lying. Even the king squinted hard at Wryth. But Haddan had heard enough.
“No matter. This is all further proof of a plot to spread discord and divide the kingdom,” Haddan said. “A scheme fueled by the Klashe and orchestrated by one of their own. We must stamp it out immediately.”
Wryth turned to them. “The general is correct. This must be ended before any war begins.”
Toranth nodded. His face was as red as Mikaen had ever seen it. “Haddan, you will command the warship headed to Cloudreach. In fact, double those forces. We will end this, once and forever.”
The king turned to his bright son. “And you will go, too, Mikaen. It is time for you to stake your claim against your brother’s betrayal. All of Hálendii must witness it, to end all possible question of lineage.”
Mikaen bowed, accepting this harsh duty. He knew, with the war to come, he would need to shine brighter than ever, to be the flag that the kingdom rallied around. Still, he also knew why his father risked his first son in such an endeavor.
He pictured Lady Myella’s belly ripening with promise.
The Massif royal line would hold— must hold —no matter what.