“I think it was your love of spectacle, wasn’t it?” the man answered, amused.
“You win this round, Nuri, but don’t forget, we are on the same side.”
There was a sudden rush as of something departing at great speed.
But Teia wasn’t alone. The man spoke once more. “I am a watcher and a messenger, not a warrior, and the farthest thing from a rebel, no matter how that just sounded. I cannot fight for you except in words. Cannot stand for you except in prayer, Adrasteia, though that is stronger than you know. But this I promise you: If you fall and Abaddon seizes you, before he can take you away to his realms to do all he has promised, I will do everything in my power to kill you. That much I promise. But no more.”
And then the immortal was gone.
“Wow. Thanks,” Teia said. She meant it to come out as sarcasm. But she’d believed every threat Abaddon had uttered, and she found, to her horror, that her gratitude was sincere.
She woke fully into the darkness of her little closet, and slept no more.
Chapter 54
~Andross the Red~
25 years ago. (Age 41.)
“You know why it must be done,” I say.
“No, we can’t. We can’t.”
“Do you think I want to do this?” I ask. This is not what I need from my bride now. I need her to be the strong one. She won’t even have to be there when it’s done. She won’t be the one who has to speak to Gavin and convince him to do the deed.
“What if we’re wrong?” Felia breathes.
She is a fierce intellect, my Felia, though she hides it under soft smiles and a warm demeanor. Others see her as always just smart enough to understand their troubles, and they see not her perceptive questions. She is patient where I have never been, and when fools explain things to her that are not, she doesn’t correct them. She plays a different game than I. Always has. It was part of my calculus when marrying her. Her strengths, plus mine, would make us unstoppable.
But only if our strengths are added, because our weaknesses subtract, too. We are both deep feelers.
Curse you, Ulbear Rathcore, for laying this trap at my feet. Curse you, Orea Pullawr, for all your pretenses at piety, while you go along with this. I will have my revenge. On both of you.
“Felia, how many languages do you know?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“How many?”
“Nine, depending how one counts. Four of those more or less fluently, albeit with muddled accents. Three dexterously enough to pass as a native, given a bit of time to brush up.”
“Did you get the translations wrong?”
She sighed. “I was certain of them at the time.”
“Felia. In a scribe’s serif stroke you see as if she laid bare all the secrets of her soul. You checked it a hundred times. We visited half the libraries of the world. You spoke with Janus Borig a dozen times. There was no mistake.”
Her hands lay in her lap like dead birds. “My love,” she says. “I was young and so, so full of myself. So proud. What if we’re wrong?”
“If we’re wrong, it will be terrible. Pointless sacrifices, meaningless deaths, talent wasted, and fortunes burned for nothing, as happens every day in these satrapies. But if we’re right . . . If we’re right but we blink—if we’re right but we’re not strong enough to do what must be done—all the world will pay. You will see all your sons die. You will bury me. You will see the Chromeria burn and the Jaspers awash in blood. You will live to see the beginning of the Blinder’s thousand-year reign. Felia, it is because you are a great heart coupled with a great mind that Orholam has trusted you with this yoke beside me. A lesser soul would break.”
“I am breaking!” she says. And tears explode.
A slave peeks in at the door, but I wave her away.
I can’t go to Felia. I barely can stand myself. This was to be the burden we would carry together, but if she is fallen, I can’t let her drag me down.
“For Orholam’s sake, stand,” I say. “My love, please.”
For long moments, she is incapable of speech. She tries to weep quietly, but can’t. “But . . . our sons!” she chokes out.
The words are barely discernible through her weeping, and part of me despises her for being weak. I need her now, and she thinks of the impossible.
I know better than to say, ‘We can have more sons.’ She will never share my bed again if I appear so callous. Nay, she will never so much as look at me again.
‘Of red cunning, the youngest son cleaves father and father and father and son.’
How I loathe prophecy. It could mean anything or nothing. Which fathers, which son or sons? Which generation? It’s worthless, meaningless. So why does it occur to me now?
I know why.
Sevastian. Curse you, Ulbear, curse you, Orea—and curse You, too, Orholam. How can I give You my son?
Chapter 55
Kip didn’t know why it was that when you think someone is trying to kill you, it should be mildly disappointing to find out that they aren’t.
They’d prepared for an enemy trap as they approached this little town. They’d arranged signals, scouted twice, set backup plans and rally points. Mostly they’d just thought they knew what was going to happen. And they’d been wrong. Which made Kip worry they’d fallen into another trap.
They’d wasted time, and they’d arrived at Apple Grove too late.
“Breaker, you need to come see this,” Winsen said. His blue-and-yellow-stained eyes looked uneasy. Kip had never seen Winsen look uneasy.
“Just tell me it’s not more of the dead,” Kip said. He was in a black mood.
They’d arrived too late to stop the White King’s armada before it launched from the next town over, and too late to stop a massacre here. They’d expected to be too late for the armada, but the massacre didn’t make any sense.
“Not dead,” Winsen said, “though I thought he was at first.”
Kip mounted up and followed him, swinging Tisis into the saddle behind him. Cruxer, Ben-hadad, and Ferkudi fell in immediately.
The town hadn’t been burned. It hadn’t been disturbed in any way, merely left neglected, as if everyone had decided to leave while unaccountably abandoning their every worldly possession. The town was empty except for children between the ages of maybe one and three years old.
Everyone old enough to speak had been killed.
No massacre felt right, but this one felt very wrong. Strange wrong. Men inflamed with Atirat’s lust for destruction don’t leave buildings standing that they could burn. Those who massacre entire villages don’t usually spare the young. Nor, afterward, do they pile up the bodies and burn them in an orderly manner until the ashes obscure what had happened, obviously staying to feed the bodies back into the hottest flames until every part is consumed.
It was careful, and massacres aren’t careful work.
They’d done a decent job of hiding what they’d done, but Kip’s war hounds could smell the tale.
Kip’s first hope was that all the missing had been kidnapped by slavers, even as he wondered at what a world it was where one could hope such a thing. But the hounds smelled no departing tracks for those adults and older children. The people of Apple Grove had been rounded up, forced to give up valuables and jewelry, moved into a field, and slaughtered there. Maybe three hundred of them.