Chapter 16 #2
Larongar’s face hardens. Taking a step closer, he studies me more closely. “You’re not Thalorkhir. You’re that scrawny boy of his.” His eye runs up and down the breadth of my frame. “All grown up now, aren’t you?”
I offer no answer, and he draws nearer. He’s armed, I note; a great sword hangs from the scabbard at his jeweled belt. Not drawn as of yet, but I am aware of the way his fingers flex close to the hilt.
“Tell me what you’re really doing here, boy,” he demands.
“Come to have your vengeance?” He tosses his head back, indicating Artoris.
“That one there—he’s nothing more than Morthiel’s puppet.
A favorite puppet, perhaps, but a puppet, nonetheless.
Your real grievance is with Morthiel. And,” he adds with a wolfish smile, “with me, I suppose.”
“Taar,” Lyria’s voice speaks close to my ear, nearly drowned out by the roar of virulium throbbing in my veins.
“Why don’t you put her down and have a go at me?
” Larongar persists. “I’m ready for you.
Don’t think you’re going to wrest any confessions or apologies from me tonight.
What happened to your world is a shame, but there’s no gains to be made in the pursuit of higher power without suffering and sacrifice.
” He shrugs, a large, rolling gesture. “I always prefer if the suffering and sacrifice is handled by someone else, of course.”
Darkness closes in around the edges of my vision.
I don’t need to take a fresh dose of virulium to give in to it—it’s simply there, lurking in my blood, waiting for me to give it free rein.
And I want to. Oh gods, how I want to! I want to rip his head from his shoulders and beat his body to a pulp with his own skull.
Larongar sees the fury my eyes reveal. He nods appreciatively.
“Yes,” he murmurs, almost as though to himself.
“Yes, this would be a good way to die: slaughtered by the son of a king I once wronged. There’s a poetic symmetry to it of which even the gods must approve.
Only there’s one small problem.” He lowers his head, looking at me from under his knotted brow.
“I did not wrong your father, boy. King Thalorkhir entered into our little arrangement with all eagerness. It was he who insisted I leave behind the Miphates, who threatened me with violence if I refused.”
I draw a sharp breath. For a moment the darkness seems to roll back, leaving me in a space of emptiness, without a ledge to stand on.
“In fact,” Larongar persists, “your father continues to participate in the ongoing corruption of Cruor.”
“What?” The word bursts from my throat like a bolt.
That wolfish smile of Larongar’s grows, revealing sharp canines.
“Did you not know? Thalorkhir is at the heart of it all. Morthiel could not do what he has done without both the help and the blessing of the king. Without the power of that unicorn of his. No, no, if it is revenge you want, I am not the king from whom to seek it. I merely set up the introduction. Of course, I stand to gain should the two of them achieve their ultimate aims. And I should think I am owed much, considering the trouble I’ve been put through since from those wretched fae raiders!
Your kind, of course, and those damnable Noxaurians. ”
His words strike my ears like the hacking strokes of a battleax, but cannot find their way through my skull. There’s nothing in my head but a dull ringing and the urge to let nothing else through, no understanding, no comprehension.
But a memory is there—a vision of long ago. I see myself, hiding behind a gauzy curtain, listening to my parents’ voices rising and falling.
“I’m doing this for you,” my father declared. “For us!”
“No, Thalor,” Mother replied bitterly, tears choking her voice. “I never wanted any of this. I want back the man I married, and Licorna wants the king it once knew.”
“I shall be a better and greater king than any of my forefathers.” There was a manic lilt to his tone, an aggression that frightened my younger self.
“Licorna will be great among the courts of Eledria, a true force to be reckoned with, not a laughing stock, hemmed on all sides by Unformed Lands, dependent on the licorneir for existence.”
“The licorneir are the heart of our world,” Mother argued. “Our very dependence upon them is what sets us apart—”
“I will not be set apart any longer.” The king’s voice is final. “I will pursue this, Lora, to whatever end, and damn all your petty fears. The great do not tremble in the face of fearful odds!”
“You sound like that Miphato.”
“I hope I do! He is a great man. And he will make me greater still before the end.”
With a ragged gasp, I pull myself back to the present, staggering so heavily, I nearly drop Ilsevel.
Lyria lets out a yelp and rushes to catch her sister’s head and shoulders, but I manage to adjust my hold.
My mind spins wildly as more intrusive memories seek to assert themselves, battering at all the bastions of repression I’ve so long fortified with my anger, my drive, my one, fixed goal.
Morthiel. So long he has loomed large in my mind, the specter of evil whom I must defeat if I hope to reclaim my world. The monster I am destined to destroy. He and Artoris and all those mages, ensconced behind Evisar’s walls.
But Father . . . he was always the paragon in my memory. Wise, noble, just, and brave. A victim, perhaps, but a heroic victim. A man upon whom I could model my own kingship, fashion my own perspective of virtue and valor.
I close my eyes. For just a moment I am back in those long-ago days, sitting on the round pommel of my father’s saddle, his strong arm wrapped around my waist as he urged Onoril, his great licorneir, to gallop across the open plains.
I felt the mighty oneness of their bond, felt the generations of Licornyn kings who were similarly bound to Onoril throughout the ages of our world.
And I knew that I too would one day join in that noble legacy.
Licorna is gone now. Destroyed.
Until this moment I believed my father and Onoril were lost along with it.
I drag a painful breath into my chest and expel it with force: “You lie, Larongar.”
“Do I?” The mortal king pulls a face. “I do enjoy a good lie now and then. It is the mortal’s prerogative, one of the few advantages we enjoy over the fae.
A gift from the gods themselves, as it were.
But in this case, no. No, I speak only the absolute truth, whether or not you care to believe it.
” He rests his hand firmly on the hilt of his sword, but still does not draw.
“I’ve not yet summoned my guard, boy,” he says, “but they will come at my shout, and you will be cut down. However, as you’ve done me service and rid me of an unwelcome burden”—another short glance back at Artoris’s corpse—“I feel generous. Put my daughter down, and you may leave my house unharmed. You may even take that one with you, if you like,” he adds with a dismissive wave of his hand at Lyria, who growls in her throat like an angry cat.
“I will go nowhere without Ilsevel,” I answer coldly.
Even by moonlight I can see the hot flush of anger rising in the king’s cheeks.
“If there is one thing I grow tired of,” he snarls, “it is other men telling me what they will do with my own daughter. She’s mine, you half-breed barbarian.
Her husband is dead, so the right of paternity returns to me.
” He begins to draw his blade, the sharp steal glinting. “I intend to hold onto my property—”
He never finishes that sentence. The words frozen on his lips, he staggers abruptly, howling with fury, and I realize he’s just been struck by a heavy object across the side of the head.
He’s too big a man to be brought down by a single blow, and begins to round on his unseen attacker.
Before he can discern the figure in the shadows, however, Lyria springs into action.
A rune already formed in the air with her fingertips, she stretches out her hand and smacks her father’s forehead.
A flare of green light nearly blinds me. I turn my face away, but hear the thud of Larongar’s collapse.
When the afterglow subsides, I peer into the dark doorway where our unexpected ally lurks.
It takes a moment for my ibrildian eyes to make sense of the shadows, but then I see her—a woman clad in regal robes of red silk and ermine, bedecked in jewels.
A crown weighs heavily upon her head, and she grips a scepter with both hands, like a varitar blade.
Her cold gaze seeks mine across the moonlit space. When she speaks, I recognize something of Ilsevel’s timbre in her tone, though she lacks the gods-gifted musicality. “Do you truly love my daughter?” she asks.
It’s the queen—Larongar’s wife. Very unlike Ilsevel in appearance, from what I can see of her in the gloom. But there is something of Ilsevel’s wild spirit in her, buried deep but not entirely gone.
“I do,” I answer, my voice strangely hushed, almost reverent in her presence.
“And she loves you?”
I look down at my wife’s pain-wreathed face, fallen back across my arm. Will she love me when she wakes? When she remembers all I have done? Is there any real hope for the two of us to make our way through this tangled darkness?
When I look up, I meet the queen’s gaze firmly. “She does.”
The cold woman brandishes her scepter, as though she would fight me. She speaks in a half-strangled voice: “Then in the name of all the gods, get you gone from here at once!”
Lyria, who had been checking the effectiveness of her rune upon the unconscious king, springs to her feet. “By your leave, my queen,” she murmurs with a hasty curtsy. Then, whirling on heel, she lunges for me, grabs my shoulder, and tugs me along the gallery.