Suffer the Children
General Balthazar’s tent was probably considered fancy in camp, but the inside was bland.
A large table sat in the middle, empty save for a carafe of wine and some glasses.
Hastily cleared, Esme believed, given the pile of books tossed in the corner.
Esme spotted a text on the weather and another on city planning.
Other scraps of the tent’s personality remained.
The room smelled like people. Lots of them.
It was well traveled by the whole army. Esme could even scent bread and drink alongside ink and parchment.
A meeting room, yes, but one of merriment, too.
A dark-skinned, skinny-armed teenager crouched by a pile of axes and swords in the left corner, sorting each kind of weapon and taking count.
He was desperately trying to look competent with them, but it was obvious he’d never swung a war hammer in his life.
When the boy’s eyes found Esme, they nearly popped out of his face.
“You’re the general’s squire, then?” Esme asked, sending him a smile.
The boy nodded numbly. “Xaphan, my lady.”
At the mention of Esme as a lady, Urias snorted. Esme elbowed him in the gut.
“Just call me Esme,” she said before turning back to Maranna. “And you’re his second?” She resisted the urge to prowl around the woman.
“Yes,” Maranna, not a lover of words, said.
Oh, if Esme had the time… but she didn’t, so she turned away from Maranna and back to her pretty general.
“I suppose these are your closest relations in the camp?” she asked.
“Yes. Whatever is to be said can be said in front of them,” Balthazar assured her. Esme hummed. Balthazar watched her lips like her smile confused him. “I’ve heard rumors about the king, about why you’re here,” he said. “I assume you’ve traveled all the way from Amaris to clarify them?”
“Ah, yes. Turiel is dead. Sure as the sun shines, he’s no longer around to see it,” Urias butted in. “Someone very talented snuck into his room and de-hearted him in his sleep.”
Esme rolled her eyes at his new word.
“And you need the Scourge for…?” Balthazar spoke directly to Esme, his voice solid despite his obvious nervousness.
“The Scourge? Nothing,” Esme scoffed, picking up the carafe of wine and a glass. She filled it nearly to the brim and took a long drink. “I only need you, General Joh’el. You ever wanted to be king? The holy vessel of the Lord Valos, richest man this side of the Wyvern Sea?”
It seemed General Joh’el was a good man. Restrained in his greed, boundless in his generosity. He was master over his urges, even, given the lack of brothels in his little town. But his eyes laid bare all his hunger. Surely, the good and fair general would say no, but his eyes said yes.
Esme leaned back on the table, and he watched her do it. Perhaps she was included in that hunger, too. She didn’t mind it. She’d been ogled by uglier men.
“This is Turiel’s royal will,” she said, pulling the scroll from her satchel and laying it flat on the table.
A curl of her finger had Balthazar approaching her side and leaning over the old parchment.
She pointed to string of pictograms that translated to the sound of his name.
“And that’s your name, listed as an heir to the throne. ”
Balthazar paled. Esme watched the hunger in his eyes explode.
“How?” Balthazar spluttered the word out, taking an uneasy seat.
“Omniel wrote this will for his son, and he named you an heir to the throne, along with another man.” Esme picked up the will.
Balthazar’s eyes followed that parchment, refusing to look anywhere else.
His gaze was penetrating, and Esme almost flicked open a button of her shirt to relieve the heat.
But no matter how pretty his eyes were, or how nice it was to watch his wide shoulders bulge as he leaned on the table, Esme had to do one tiny thing before indulging herself—
“Shall I read it to you, General?”
Balthazar nodded, shifting anxiously in his seat.
Esme read the whole thing, eyes flicking up to the general every few seconds. When she’d finished, she started counting the seconds.
C’mon…
“So it really named me?” Balthazar asked, breathless.
Esme’s tongue punched her cheek and she leaned in.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, adorable even when he was confused.
“Why is it taking so long?” Urias asked from across the tent, tilting his head.
“Stop being impatient,” Esme muttered, impatient.
As if on cue, the ground beneath her feet trembled, throwing Balthazar off his chair. He dragged himself towards the mouth of the tent. His lips moved but his voice died in his throat. Esme could only just read the word children off his quivering lips.
Just as Balthazar wobbled to his feet, his knee broke beneath him.
He gasped in pain as an invisible tormenter landed another hit to his other leg, bringing him to his knees.
Esme shivered at the nauseating thicket of Magic curling around her, as Balthazar took its beating.
Her heart twisted when the spell wrenched his neck back almost to the point of snapping.
With pleas dying on his bluing lips, the spell carved itself into his throat with a firebrand talon.
Across from Balthazar, Maranna thrashed against the spell’s grip, but there seemed to be an immovable knee in her spine.
Weight bared heavier and heavier on her, like a crushing stone, until the curses from her mouth were nothing but gurgles.
When her eyes rolled into the back of her skull, the spell grabbed her by the chin and left its grisly mark on her, too.
At Esme’s own feet, Xaphan wailed. The spell let him choke and snivel and weep as it coiled its dreaded decree across his skin. Guilt pricked at Esme. A shadow swiped the boy’s tears from his face, but she couldn’t save him from any more pain. This was a necessity.
Balthazar stumbled up from the ground before agony sent him right back down. He tried to gather himself again but slipped in his own blood. With his face slathered in red and his fingers shaking too hard to lean on, he finally abandoned any hope of standing.
“So, it can be recast,” Urias murmured, coming over to stand beside Esme. “Interesting.”
“Indeed,” Esme agreed, putting the will down.
“Now that that’s established, let me explain.
” She hooked her finger under her collar to pull it down.
Balthazar’s eyes widened, even while wrapped up in his own panic.
“The will is a spell. It sits on mine, Urias’s, and most of the court’s throats right now, and it won’t leave until we hold the competition for the throne and crown either you or Janos according to the will’s rules.
” Balthazar’s eyes moved over the words on Esme’s neck like he could read them.
Perhaps promised dread was understandable in all tongues.
Then he lunged for her.
“Why the fuck would you read that here?” he growled, grabbing her shirt and yanking her close enough to bite.
“There are children in this camp, Wraith. They could have been hurt. They could have been killed,” he snarled.
Up this close, “Bal” was another man. He was blood-streaked, dirty, with saliva pooling in his mouth like a hound begging to maul the fox it had found.
He was not handsome. The lines of his face were severe, and the breath curling from his mouth was hot enough to scald.
He’d swept her to his height without a second thought.
Against her will, Esme’s heart kicked into a gallop.
She tipped her head back to smell the outside. The shadows whispered the state of camp to her—wrecked, but not ruined by the earthquake. No dead.
“Heel, General. Your babies are rattled but alive. Only the three of you are bound by the spell because you’ve heard it.
” She pushed him out of her space with her finger, and he dropped her.
“And I read it because if you didn’t cooperate, everyone would die.
There are children in Amaris, too. Thousands more than in this camp. ”
Balthazar’s attempt at a deep breath sounded like wind ripping through two burlap sacks.
His anger was slow to freeze over, but Esme watched his face change, bit by bit, back to the handsome man who’d been nervous to invite her into his tent ten minutes ago.
Xaphan groaned behind them, and the sound snapped Balthazar out of his rage completely.
He pulled the boy into his arms, careful not to touch the bloody words.
His hold was as tender as a mother’s. It took no effort to load Xaphan’s body into his arms and move him to a cot on the other side of the room.
“If I don’t come with you, I’ll die?” Balthazar asked, kneeling over the boy, his back to the Wraiths. Then, as if rereading the will on that thin throat, he clarified, “If I don’t come with you, they both die.”
“You said they were your two closest relations,” Esme said. “And I couldn’t just bet on your toothless cooperation. All you’d have to do is run away one night and the whole kingdom would be fucked. This way, if you decide to flee, we all take the trip down to Muhnir together.”
Balthazar stared at the packed earth just beside Xaphan’s face. Seconds passed, drip-drops of blood acting as an hourglass.
“Tell me more about this will,” he said finally, standing. His eyes met Maranna’s, hers bright with warning, but he simply nodded to tell her to lay down, too.
Balthazar threw himself into a chair beside Esme, something halfway between the beast breathing down her neck and that greedy man with the world in his eyes. There were consequences to violence. There were consequences to power. He now wore them on his throat.
Esme watched him as she explained Omniel and his clairvoyant will.
Her words were unimportant. The churning machine of his mind was practically blowing steam from his ears.
He did not sit solemn and silenced like a kicked dog, nor was he loading his belt with knives to go conquer Amaris. He listened. He judged.
He was the hound and its master in one: Balthazar Joh’el of Prelyn, the most perfect little haven in all the land, and General Joh’el of the Scourge, who’d terrified a Wraith with his rage.
There was so much more to him beneath that handsome face and nervous smile.
More than snarling words and bloodied fists, too.
Esme found herself itching to know all of it.