Ambrose pursed his mouth, thinking, and slowly spun the staff, Merle adjusting his footing as the jewel turned beneath his talons. “Guess I was wrong.” He shrugged, as if unconcerned.
“Wrong?” I should’ve punched him.
“Well, I wasn’t wrong before,” Ambrose hastily and cheerfully said. “Everything was as it should be, but now it’s changed. That’s my point.”
“Explain.” I held on to my temper. A miracle. Or the drugging enchantment still winding around us took away my desire to fight. I should be more worried about that.
The wizard waved a hand at the sea. “There are people and forces in the world that can change the currents of events. We expect the river to flow from the mountains to the sea. If someone picks up the river in its bed, turns it around to run in the opposite direction—well, how can that be predicted?”
I stared at him. “What does that even mean?”
Ambrose stroked Merle’s back, murmuring praise while the bird preened. “Merle informs me that the denizens of the sea below us observed our approach and passed the word. I didn’t anticipate that anyone here could talk to the fish.”
“You talk to a bird.”
“Yes, but that’s entirely different.” Ambrose’s eyes sparkled. “Isn’t it exciting?”
Great. Just great. “Exciting” he called the demise of our entire enterprise. And yet the usual rage that should carry me through this—and lend fire to the need to extract us—didn’t rise up. It all seemed so unreal, like a dream. Perhaps I’d wake and we’d be about to storm Calanthe, ready for another conquest, violent and bloody. Something I understood. Something I could handle. I could only hope it was a dream.
Surreptitiously, I looked down, just to be sure I wore my armor and carried my hammer, the bagiroca hanging from my belt. All as usual, and I breathed a sigh of relief. In a dream I’d likely be naked and carrying something absurd as a weapon, like a child’s sweet tree-finger. I hadn’t thought of those candied treats in ages. The court wizards had made them for special occasions. A memory of how magic tasted and felt—warning me of what I felt now.
As impossible as it all seemed, this was real. We were simply caught in an enchantment. I’d break it if I could—and yet I didn’t want to. That, too, must be part of the magic, and I could do nothing about it.
Details of the island resolved as we drew near, meekly letting ourselves be guided—or herded—into rounding the northern spur to the long, east-facing side. The high, white cliffs shone in the midday sun like a beacon. Here and there waterfalls tumbled from them into the sea, the pools beneath the vivid indigo indicating depth. Some of the falls fanned like an exotic bird’s tail, separating into fine white sprays over cascading ledges covered in emerald moss. Other falls descended in impossible and vivid shades. The pools of poisoned, sulfurous water on Vurgmun had been like that, proclaiming their toxicity with unnatural colors.
“Tainted water?” I mused. Seemed unlikely, for a purported paradise.
“No,” Sondra breathed. “Not falls of water, but of flowers.”
And she was right. Impossible as it seemed, huge swaths of the cliffs were draped with connecting vines blossoming in every color imaginable. The scent that had been swirling over us grew stronger, sweet and spicy, redolent of warm nights and the paradise of sensual ease.
At the most verdant section, a palace rose from the cliffs and the waterfalls of flowers, an ornate concoction of towers, balconies, and staircases. It perched right on the edge, fanciful as the ice sculptures my mother used to commission for formal midwinter dinners in Oriel, back before.
Just to the south of the palace, a great cove rounded inward protected by the point of the cliffs on one side, and a built-up fortification on the other. A city, also mainly of the white stone, with domes and spires of gold, also draped in flowers, ranged up and down the hills, cupping around an extensive harbor filled with boats of all shapes and sizes.
And there, an imperial warship sat docked—with an empty space next to it. Obviously our intended resting spot. Hopefully not one as permanent as the grave.
“It’s a trap,” I confirmed aloud, aware I also gripped the rail hard enough to crack it. Here is where it would end, with us all drowned or cut down. Figured. The likes of me should never be allowed to set feet on such a paradise.
“I don’t think so,” General Kara said, surprising me. He’d been quiet so long that I’d nearly forgotten his presence on the other side of Sondra. “If you’d given the order to fire on them, we could’ve crushed those little boats at any time. None of those lads and maids appeared to be warriors, nor did any of them carry weapons that I saw.”
“They could hide weapons below a false bottom,” I noted darkly. What in Sawehl had made me so soft that I hadn’t given the order? Take Calanthe. Take Euthalia and her Abiding Ring. Take Ambrose and his idealistic tales of seduction. A nearby young woman in a delicate sailboat with a billowing shell-pink sail waved with languid grace, smiling as she deftly kept her place in the water. Had I ever been that young, that innocent? Given the amount of pretty skin showing through the blossoms she wore, they’d have to be unusual weapons if she had them. “They played us,” I said, knowing myself for the worst of fools. “Who could fire on these … children?”
“Anure,” Kara replied, a pall of remembered horrors reflected in his face, shades of terrors witnessed.
“But he didn’t on Calanthe,” I reminded them. “He didn’t have to because they…” Welcomed him in. The thought struck me with renewed horror. Had it gone like this? Did I follow in the tyrant’s footsteps?
“And not exactly children.” Sondra filled in the gap I left, not seeming to notice I hadn’t finished my sentence aloud. “These lads and maids are quite nubile. Perhaps the Calantheans gamble less that the Slave King won’t be another Anure, and more that his time of privation in the mines has left him hungry for the feasts of the flesh.” She gave me an arch look. “Men have been bribed with less enticing spectacles.”
A growl crawled under my breath for her ill-timed humor, and I swallowed it only because her earlier fragility still showed in the pallor of her skin and the brackets around her tight lips.
Why she so enjoyed poking me about this, I didn’t know. In all truth, that part of me had burned away along with everything else tender in the boy I’d been. Sexual dalliances belonged to the world of the living, and I had nothing left in me of that. I held no illusions about that much. My stolen kingdom was a realm of scar tissue, burnt ashes, and revenge.
Which made Ambrose’s insistence that I somehow court and seduce this queen of nobility, the prize blossom among hothouse roses, all the more ridiculous.
“They misfired there, because I’m not interested,” I managed to say, hoping to put that conversation to rest. No such luck.
“Besides”—Ambrose studied me, all flippant behavior gone, his gaze penetrating—“your intended bride will no doubt prefer you don’t dally with anyone but her.”
I glared at him, ignoring Sondra, who made a choking sound as she smothered a laugh. For my part, I quelled any reply to that one. Of all the wild quests Ambrose had taken us on, this one had to take the tournament grand prize.