33
Aspen
The king slithered from the largest pavilion and paced through the camp, a scowl distorting his mustache.
“Do I look like a patient king?” he bitched to Dame Muriel. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about tradition. Not if it conflicts with my agenda.”
“It’s less about tradition and more about tactics, Your Majesty,” the woman responded, her sickle nowhere in sight. “People will be less on guard if we time this correctly.”
“I’ve tried this so-called tactic before,” Rhys grumbled. “It didn’t work for a king. What makes you think it will work for an infantry of soldiers?”
For fuck’s sake. This spoiled monarch had a nasty habit of ejaculating that royal word all over the place, no matter which doorstep he darkened, as if anyone would forget his status as a superior being instead of an evolutionary mistake.
The female knight maintained a dignified expression. “With all due respect, Sire. Your gambit involved a fortress and a squad of civilians as your pawns. Our objective is the opposite.”
Fortress. Civilians. Opposite.
He was referring to a previous Reaper’s Fest. Namely, the castle blackout ages ago, when he manipulated civilians to lay siege to the fortress’s walls.
This confirmed the rest of what Aire and I knew. How the ambushes would take place far from the castle, and the attackers would be traitorous knights instead of common folk.
Rhys’s spittle flew across the camp. Despite his belittling protests, the assembly took it in stride, evidently tolerating the prick as a means to an end.
So Summer hadn’t motivated this troop to commit treason by charming them.
Hardly a shocker. Instead, they’d been mobilized purely to further their cause, to collapse Poet and Briar’s crusade for born souls, to sabotage the clan’s progress for equality.
Rhys wasn’t an ally. He was a weapon, an outlet to revolt while banking on the clout, military reinforcements, and protection of a monarch. They didn’t care which ruler they served, so long as their endgames matched.
Not that it made a lick of difference. Not with this lot still bent on slaughtering their own kin.
By feeding Summer lies, I’d influenced the Royal shithead to misdirect these knights each time. Because that was no longer an option, I held my ground.
The oak rained dead leaves over their heads.
Grunting, the king dragged several commanders and members of his security detail out of earshot.
While he pissed on the knights’ lack of success and shat on their mood, my eyes veered toward the pavilion he’d exited. Newly erected, it must be Rhys’s lair.
Creeping nearer to the king and eavesdropping wouldn’t work. Too many officers patrolled that end of the vicinity. But while Rhys bleated on and on, his tent stood empty, the entrance unmanned.
Scuttling through the underbrush, I slipped past armed silhouettes. A hellish montage of The Shadow Orchard raided my mind, culminating in Merit’s head tumbling off the end of my axe. I clenched my eyes shut until it passed, then kept going.
The oak towered over the tent’s canopy, two hundred feet of vertical bark emitting creaking noises. I wavered, a frigid splash of anxiety icing my veins. To reach my destination, I’d have to skulk past the tree and a high stack of kindling.
One tentative step, then another. A branch bent as though warning me not to come closer, as if recognizing my connection to Mama, who once dug her blade into this tree.
Grief cramped my stomach. I could ask a hundred questions, list a thousand pains since that day, exhibit my markings like scars, vent and lash out, ask forgiveness on Mama’s behalf, and plead for this tree to remove the motifs.
Not for myself, nor out of shame. The markings were beautiful, and I handled the pain.
But they tormented my mother.
Tiptoeing on eggshells, I approached. Up close, the tree’s pillar contracted like a human lung. As my lips parted, someone threw another log into one of the neighboring blazes. The fire thrashed, flames whipping about.
The oak groaned, its leaves shivering. My lips closed, a tender sensation clamping onto my chest as I imagined Briar prostrating herself to this tree. I thought of Rhys and this army burning Summer tinder to prevent the oak from snapping them in half with its roots.
I thought of Autumn, the land of mercy. I thought of The Dark Seasons, where our environments reigned supreme, equally cruel and kind.
My palm settled on the trunk, and a gasp lurched from my mouth. Wood brimmed under my touch, the hum of its breath radiating.
This mythic life-force had issued a severe punishment on Mama. That was the way of nature and humanity. Allies sometimes, victims other times. Either way, the tree hadn’t been absently vicious. No, it had been protecting itself, like it was doing now against this camp.
The oak wasn’t a villain. The real monster stood twenty feet away.
My fingertips caressed the trunk. “I won’t let them harm you.”
The branches stalled, then relaxed. The trunk’s internal humming gentled as an acorn rolled to the tip of one bough. Unfurling, the branch extended the nut to me, the way it once gifted Briar a strand of golden leaves for her hair.
That same warmth spread to my hand as I took the acorn and stored it in my pocket.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Rhys brayed louder than a mule, the noise abrasive enough to strip paint. That meant I had ten-ish minutes before he charged to his tent.
Flitting in and out of shadows, I stole beneath the rear flap.
The stench of arrogance, misogyny, and xenophobia imbued the space like a pathogen.
Outside, muffled threats spewed from Rhys’s oversized mouth.
Inside, a bead of sweat trailed down my back.
I rifled through his coffers, lifted chests and trunks, searched every bag and leaf of parchment.
No incriminating documents. No compromising maps.
Nothing the clan could use.
After seven years of manipulating this bigot, I fisted my hips. It wasn’t so much that he wouldn’t leave valuables lying around in the obvious places. Rather, this monarch thought about himself more than other people.
“Rhys wouldn’t store prized possessions somewhere inconvenient for him,” I muttered.
Adding insult to arrogance, a smug ruler would stash an object in a location that gave the illusion of superiority. He’d use it as another opportunity to congratulate himself, presumably for being smart.
Twisting to his desk, my gaze landed a gold crescent.
Supplementing a quill and inkwell, the crown rested atop a mahogany box like a holy shrine, attempting to compensate for the fact that he rarely did anything scholastic.
If that stick of furniture had ever seen Rhys accomplish more than licking his scrotum or signing a death warrant in blood, I’d hand over my axe.
Hastening to the crown, I plucked the garish thing off the tabletop. Encrusted in jewels larger and heavier than Rhys’s brain, it weighed down my hands. As a precaution, I checked the fastenings and elaborate band.
I wasn’t a goldsmith like Vex, who led the Masters to their downfall. But I was the daughter of a carpenter.
Setting aside the crown, I went after the real target. Snatching the box, I tested the hinges, flipped open the casement, and traced the interior lining. And then I pressed on the dovetail joints.
One of them popped downward, triggering the lid’s underside, which cracked open. A slender bottle dropped into my palm. Milky liquid swam inside the glass, the contents tinted with dusty strings of rose gold.
I’d seen this fluid before. Back in The Phantom Wild, Jeryn and Flare gave a tour of the palace ruins.
The excursion included an ominous trip through the secret catacombs of an ancient society, plus Jeryn’s makeshift laboratory and its collection of rainforest medicines.
Among a batch of remedies, this had been one of them.
Except Jeryn hadn’t described what it did. He wasn’t able to test this mixture in the rainforest, and I had no clue which samples he brought back to Winter.
Either way, Jeryn would never hand anything over to Rhys. Which meant Summer had obtained this drug by some other means.
Knights. Ambushes.
Commoner tools intended as weapons. Reaper’s Fest.
Rhys’s enigmatic secondary informant. A bottle containing who the fuck knew what. And a secret heir to Summer’s throne.
How the hell did this add up?
I swiped the bottle, jammed it into my pocket beside the acorn, readjusted the casement, and returned the crown to its original place.
Then I hightailed out of there, detouring to the armory tent next.
It took half an hour of squatting in a thorny hedge before a group of soldiers vacated the interior.
By the time I slipped inside, Rhys had stomped into his pavilion with the grace of a rhinoceros. According to whispers between the officers, he had accepted their plan.
While disguises for Reaper’s Fest might require makeshift weapons, the imbalance of wielding commoner defenses against advanced ones still eluded me. That was assuming other loyal troops were indeed the targets. But with the revels approaching, I couldn’t waste time speculating.
After inspecting the assembly of every cleaver and scythe, I went to work. Yanking an ancient root-shaped awl from the smith belt at my waist, I clamped it between my teeth. A basic version wouldn’t have disassembled a thing. Not to the necessary degree, not within minutes, and not on its own.
This one had been graced by nature. It succeeded in creating fractures in the handles, then loosened the grips from each blade. Next, a file whittled down the honed edges.
Last, I went after the sickles, pitchforks, and other random instruments.
Subtle adjustments, so no one would detect vandalism.
Keeping it to a moderate number, I concentrated on a fraction of the weapons instead of the whole assortment.
To these knights, the damages would appear faulty and lacking quality.
Moving swiftly, I winced through the motions. These tools had been crafted by someone who valued them. And here I was, botching up a fellow smith’s labor.
Picturing the clan and every born soul in this kingdom, I labored onward. I should have been out of here by now, but in case Lyrik’s concoction failed to wipe out every weapon, backup precautions like this were essential.
After returning the awl to my belt, I reached for a bundle of reeds tethered around my ankle.
The straw-like batch Lyrik provided resembled a dead bouquet, except for the glowing nubs sprouting from each stalk, the bulbs injected with the type of stuff I normally wouldn’t inflict on a serial killer.
But for murderous knights and a tyrannical king, exceptions could be made.
The rogue promised this wouldn’t injure the oak or any other tree. But it would fuck up everything else, all while seeming like an elemental act.
I gripped the reeds on both ends, snapped them in half, and pitched the clump at the stock of compromised weapons. Oxygen did the rest, activating the stalks. Embers flew, the bundle sizzled, and black tendrils coiled from the split.
Smoke leaked from the pavilion. Hollers erupted, shrill and overlapping.
“Fire!”
“The armory tent!”
Footfalls charged my way while someone bellowed, “Water!”
“Thirty seconds. Then kiss your ass goodbye.”
Replaying Lyrik’s warning, I dropped to the grass and scrambled under the tent. Three yards later, I launched to my feet and bolted.
And the camp exploded.