Chapter 20 #2
In Renn’s second day behind closed doors, I finished outfitting the newest craftlock recruits with uniforms. They were a little piecemeal—things in Cansere didn’t run as smoothly since Rove fell—but they would work well enough.
I handed out my last set to a soulbinder before marking it in a ledger and coming back to the table set outside the east tower, where Eden oversaw everything.
She sat at the table over a ledger, a pencil gripped tightly in her white-knuckled fist, her eyes unfocused.
Her face held a chilling sort of serenity, like one who had accepted death, or perhaps one who had already died.
Flashes of Rove Castle zipped behind my eyes. Bodies in the corridors, the Lords’ Hall—
“We will be ready.” Eden’s voice rang, free of intonation. Of any emotion at all. “We’ve been preparing all this time. Derren Castle is well fortified.”
The impending siege, she meant.
Rove Castle had also been well fortified, or so I thought. I swallowed the thought. “We have soulbinders now, too,” I pointed out.
Neither of us shared what haunted us—that the enemy’s craftlock soldiers were far more numerous and better trained than our own. That Rove, a far larger fortress, had fallen in a single night to those soldiers.
“We have Renn,” I added, even if only to myself.
She nodded. Drew in a deep breath.
We stayed like that for a full minute, lost in our thoughts, our scars.
“If you want to go farther inland,” I tried, “you can.” Commander Stonelay had made the same offer to me. I think His Majesty would prefer it, he’d said.
Eden shook her head. “I will stay. I will fight. I . . .” Her lip trembled, and she bit it until it stilled. “I will not run from that man. I will kill him myself.”
I, too, had determined not to run. Not from the war. I wouldn’t leave Renn, Brien, Dan. I couldn’t. To run would be to tell them I didn’t believe in them. That I wanted to save my own skin while they flayed theirs upon the blades of Sesta.
I shut my eyes against the harsh metaphor, tasting darkness in the back of my throat, the cool touch of—
My eyelids shot open. Pushing off the castle wall, I looked around the bailey.
The cool caress of death fluttered across my collarbone.
“I’ll be right back.”
Eden didn’t complain as I moved eastward, sniffing out death. It had been some time since the old sense had visited me; I’d nearly forgotten our unsightly bond.
I neared Beatty and a soldier she spoke to, but death didn’t hover around them. Passing by, I found an older soldier whittling near the portcullis. Death choked out my lungs like I’d put my face into the bowl end of a pipe.
“I’m a healer.” I approached and kneeled, since he sat in a mangled bed of clover. I might not have been as strong or fast as I once was, but I was a healer, and I couldn’t do nothing.
His knife stilled. “I know. But I’ve no need of you.”
I extended my hands. “Please.”
Sighing, the man set aside his work—I thought he was carving a hound, but the work was too new for fine details—and allowed me to touch the underside of his jaw.
His lumis mimicked chain mail, albeit in a more equine shape. Off-center, a cluster of the chains had darkened, some disintegrated entirely. The darkness stretched outward like veins of infection, nearly touching the outer edges of his lumis. Death lines spiraled out in all directions.
If I interpreted it correctly, his heart was about to fail.
I pressed my palms into the rotting gap and pulled magic through me, urging ashy links to re-form themselves .
. . noting the slowness with which they did.
Ursa’s powers were no longer with me, and working in haste, I felt it keenly.
Still, I summoned the magic and twisted my hands, encouraging it to mimic the shape of the links, to reseal the hole, then to act as a balm and polish to the other blackened links, refortifying them one at a time.
The magic held; the black did not encroach to the edges of the lumis.
The chill of death across my skin abated entirely.
Sighing in relief, I slipped from the soldier’s lumis and pulled back.
“Huh.” He rubbed his chest. “I . . .” He hesitated. Studied me. “How did you know?”
I wondered what symptoms he had felt before my intervention. If he’d thought them normal conditions of warfare, of drills and late nights, much in the same way I’d ignored the early signs of the rat plague in myself last year. Offering an assuring smile, I answered, “You looked pale.”
He accepted this, thanked me, and returned to his whittling.
As I walked away, in my mind’s eye I found myself in another’s lumis, not of chain links or even broken glass, but of floating numbers of endless math equations.
They swirled around me in a lazy dance, and distantly, against my skin, the cool air of Rove Castle raised gooseflesh on my arms, and the tangy scent of spilled blood stung my nostrils.
I formed my hands into fists, my fingernails carving ravines into my palms. Yet I felt something tangible there, much like the number three I’d wrenched from that dragon’s lumis, the one the death lines pointed to. The weakness.
I’d snapped that piece and dropped the Sestan there in the hall. It was the first and only time I’d used my ability to kill someone. And yet, in that instance, it had been him or me.
I no longer had Ursa, but I had been touched by death, and death directed me to the spaces that would hurt bodies the most. It mattered not who it was—a peasant, a soldier, a king. Death would have all of them, eventually.
With my help, it could have them sooner.
I paused then, in the shadow of the bailey wall, the sounds of training echoing nearby, scents of sun-hot grass wafting on the breeze. I turned northward, though the stone prevented me from seeing the horizon. Still, I know I faced it. My prison, my fears.
Sesta.
I am not afraid. I heard it through my thoughts as though Ursa recited it along with me. I am to be feared.
I swallowed. Pressed my open hands to the wall. I am not afraid. I am to be feared.
I’d died once already. Death was my companion, not theirs.
“I am not afraid,” I whispered, digging my nails into the mortar between stones. “I am to be feared.”
Even the self-proclaimed son of the goddess Zia, Adoel Nicosia, hadn’t wanted me in his lumis.
“I wield death as a sword,” I finished, and pushed back from the wall, looking upward to the sky above it. I pressed my lips together. Tightened my fingers into fists. Squared my shoulders.
Adoel Nicosia could bring his armies. I would not balk.
He would fear me.
He has feared me.
And I would show no mercy.
By evening I’d grown antsy. Renn’s presence rolled through me like the sea, undulating and churning, crests and troughs.
Little pricks of worry here, caresses of victory there.
He proved increasingly difficult to read.
For all the confidence he’d had, the amount of time it was taking to finalize this treaty had me worried.
I was not beyond eavesdropping, so I asked Beatty if I might take the king his tray for the night.
She’d sent one up a couple of hours before but prepared a tray of treats for Renn and Sir Arquan.
I carried it carefully to the top of the keep where the meeting was held, relieved to see Sten standing outside the narrow door to the room.
Setting the tray on the floor, I approached the door and pulled my hair back, pressed my ear to the old wood. Sten did not stop me, merely shook his head and folded his burly arms.
“—out of time to debate.” Sir Arquan’s accent made him easy to pinpoint. “I will say it again, Your Majesty. You need Antsan. You are looming dangerously close to default.”
Renn was far harder to make out; he spoke in low, dulcet tones, unbothered, measured. “That is an Antsan law, not Canseren. You’ve told me time and time again that your troops—forgive me, King Vitsoph’s troops—are at the ready. To be so eager, I believe you need this deal just as much as I do.”
Silence, for a moment, before Renn continued, “You’ve shown your hand in—” Then he spoke so low I could not make out the words, but I felt an inkling of his boldness through the link. “—not doing me a favor.”
“You make many assumptions—”
“Are your people starving yet, Sir Arquan?”
I held my breath, listening for the response. Something—a chair, maybe—creaked.
“Let’s take the focus off the Vitsophs for a moment and speak of that,” Renn pressed, and I hoped by the emissary’s lack of response that Renn had hit true. “Perhaps we need not waste food on a wedding when it could be feeding your people.”
I remembered, so long ago, when I’d first heard of these talks, that King Grejor had not wanted an Antsan woman on the Canseren throne.
It was the reason he wasn’t willing to barter with Prince Adrinn.
Was that something Renn had brought up, or was it too insulting a play?
I knew little of politics and less of strategy.
Surely Renn had already brought up his connection to Nicosia .
. . or was he trying to tire Sir Arquan first?
Perhaps lose as little as possible before getting what he wanted?
I’d missed something. The voices came through as mumbles.
Sten put his hand on my shoulder; I brushed him off. They were talking about Princess Azra again, Sir Arquan relating her many talents.
Renn interrupted him. “She has made claims and comments I might consider acts of subversion. I’m not interested. One of her sisters, perhaps.”
My heart squeezed. One of her sisters? What? Yet I knew he didn’t mean it. Strategy, Nym. It’s all strategy.
Renn’s voice, in memory, sprung to mind. Please don’t hate me for what I’ll have to do to make this work.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be listening in after all.
“A sister would be amenable, but not the eldest.” Sir Arquan spoke with measured grace. “She is already promised, and that cannot be broken. But an Antsan daughter beside your throne would guarantee our people fed.”
“And what if I were to tell you I had twice the land you perceive? Endless acres for farming.”
A long pause. “You would divide your country?”
“But there is the fallacy in your question.” I could see in my mind Renn leaning forward, folding his hands beneath his chin. “Would I divide my countries.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I have men in Sesta as we speak. Men searching for documentation Adoel Nicosia would very much like to see destroyed—”
I stepped back. Met Sten’s eyes. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask, Satisfied? But he had the decency not to voice it. If I could hear the men in the room, they would hear us as well.
Instead I picked up the tray and handed it to Sten. Murmured, “Make sure you’re eating,” before departing back the way I’d come, praying to find something—anything—to take my mind off the negotiations that would fundamentally decide the course of my life.