Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (31 page)

He surprised her by considering her question with absolute seriousness, frowning in a thoughtful way that changed his face completely. His eyes took on a distant look. ‘Yes, I do. By mortal standards, anyway.’

She forced the bread down her dry throat. ‘So what are we supposed to do then?’

‘Well, I think the worst thing you can do to gods is to stop believing in them.’ He peered up at the sky, then he grinned at her, and the clouds left his eyes. ‘But I wouldn’t be too hasty. It’s not so easy to tell the difference between what the gods have done, and what has simply been blamed on them. I’ve met a lot of people in a lot of places who claim to speak for the gods. Personally, I’ve never understood why people believe them, but many do.’

She thought about the elixir. What did she really know about it? How could she be sure the visions came from the gods when everything else she had ever been told about her religion had turned out to be a lie?

‘Are you married, King Jachad?’

He gave a rueful little laugh. ‘Now you sound like a Nomas – like my mother, to be precise. No, I’m not married.’

‘Is it because of her – the Mongrel?’

The Nomas king turned sharply to her, and she could see that her question had both surprised and disarmed him. ‘Yes. I suppose you could say that,’ he answered. His eyes held a curious intensity. ‘You are an extraordinary woman, do you know that? You certainly don’t miss much.’

‘It’s in your voice, when you speak of her. The way you say her name,’ she explained, uncomfortable with the compliment, if it had been one. A breeze, the first harbinger of evening, rustled the hair around her face. ‘You’re bound to her somehow.’

‘That’s one way to put it – though it’s probably not in the way you think.’

Apparently he was not inclined to explain further, and the companionable silence returned. She let her mind drift, not
thinking about anything in particular. She could feel herself on the edge of some crucial understanding; instinct told her that if she pursued it too vigorously, it would slip away.

A dove’s mournful cry sounded from a drooping palm tree nearby. Its mate fluttered over in a whir of wings.

‘There were two earthquakes,’ she said quietly. ‘Not three.’

Jachad looked over at her. ‘That’s right.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure. A smallish one, and then the big one just after sunset last night. I’m not likely to forget either of them any time soon, believe me.’

‘But nothing after that. Nothing at all – no aftershocks, even.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed again. There was curiosity in his voice, but it wasn’t his way to question her. ‘I heard about what happened at the mines after the second earthquake,’ he offered a few moments later. ‘It sounds quite extraordinary: hundreds of miners were trapped in the collapse, and then the shaft just suddenly opened up. No one knows how.’ His blue eyes fixed on her. ‘They’re calling it a miracle. And it happened just before Frea took off with Dramash.’

Harotha reached up and rubbed her cheek. Suddenly she could feel the imprint of Saria’s fingers there as if her sister-in-law had slapped her no more than a moment ago. But Saria was dead.
Maybe when you’re a mother, you’ll understand
: Saria’s last words to her before she ran after Dramash – her son.
Faroth’s
son. The last in a line of ashas stretching as far back in time as the elixir’s stream had carried her.

Jachad stood up from the rock and stretched languorously.
‘I’m not used to sitting for so long. I think I’ll go for a walk.’

The street had emptied out again as Faroth and his friends had moved inside his house, pointedly excluding Harotha from the meeting. Smoke wound up from the chimneys and the familiar scents of homely cooking drifted by on the steadily cooling air.

She stood up as well. ‘I’ll go with you.’

By mutual accord they turned right, walking away from Faroth’s house, and when they came to a crossing, they turned left, again by unspoken agreement.

‘Careful,’ Jachad murmured as he steered her around a trench in the road that looked as if it might have been dug out by a large, clawed foot.

‘Just to be clear,’ she began. She glanced at her companion as they walked along in the fading light. Both of them had subtly quickened their pace. ‘We’re going to find those two dereshadi Faroth brought back, take one and fly it back to the temple, yes?’

Again she found herself caught in his deep blue eyes; at this moment she could truly believe that his father was the sun. He had warmth banked down inside of him, an unending and limitless supply, and it radiated out from his gently conspiratorial smile. ‘Of course we are,’ he agreed. ‘Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?’

A voice ordered Rho to wake up, and nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to obey – he tried to say this, but the voice had already become just another random detail in the jumbled landscape of his nightmare. He was in a forest with a little curly-haired Shadari boy, and they climbed a tree, only now the boy was his older brother, Trey.

‘You’re not Trey,’ Rho told the boy. ‘Trey’s dead. He died hunting, a month after I left Norland.’

‘Isn’t this Norland?’ asked the boy. They were sitting side by side on a broad branch, and when Rho looked down he saw not a forest floor but a mountainside sloping away from him, all jagged rocks under a blanket of new snow. The boy who was and wasn’t Trey stood up and began jumping up and down on the branch. Rho wanted him to stop – he was afraid, but he found that he could neither speak nor move; all the while the boy was laughing out loud and jumping, jumping and laughing. He heard the cracking sound as the branch began to break, but it wasn’t the branch that was cracking, it was the dark Norland sky, slicing open to reveal a zigzag of blinding light—

The voice had returned, and it was hard and cold. Gratefully, he grabbed on to it and rode it back to consciousness. He became aware of his limbs, of the dampness of sweat on his skin. The familiar lumpiness of the mattress underneath him told him that he was back in his own room. He blinked his scratchy eyes until he could see again.

He turned his head and saw a black-gloved fist dart out and flick up his shirt to expose his wound. The warm air hit his sore flesh like a handful of sand.

Frea’s finger traced the long line of the gash. He could not feel her touch in any one place; the whole wound pulsed and throbbed as one. She was right: the cut had not closed cleanly, despite Daem’s efforts. Where was Daem, anyway? And Ingeld and Ongen, where were they? He felt the pressure of her hand where it had come to rest on his hip.

He dragged his eyes up to her face and saw that she was wearing the silver helmet. If he’d had the strength, he would have ripped the thing off her head. he reminded her.

She withdrew her hand and paced around his bed. He forced himself to sit up, clenching his teeth against the pain screaming from his side. The room was empty except for the two of them, but he had no doubt the Shadari boy was somewhere close by.

she said.

A scrap of memory floated through his mind: walking Ravindal’s battlements on a seamless Norland night, listening to the wolves howl, breathing in the cosy scent of wood fires on the sharp air, watching the lights from the town of Ravinsur twinkling far below. He had been alone then, but not lonely, not like now. he told her.

He noticed the jug of wine she had presumably brought for him left out on the table. Beads of sweat rolled lazily down its side. He pushed himself away from the bed and let momentum carry him to the table. He fell heavily onto the nearest chair. The jug was cool against his palms as he lifted it up and drank greedily.

Frea circled around to the opposite side of the table and jerked another chair underneath her. She paused for a moment, watching him drink, and then flicked her white braids back across her shoulder.

<
Me?
> he asked. He looked over the rim of the jug at his reflection in her helmet.

she said.

Rho wasn’t flattered; intelligence was a quality she neither liked nor admired. At the same time, he couldn’t help but notice
the way her left hand rested on the table, with her white wrist visible between the top of her gloves and the sleeve of her shirt, and he found himself staring fixedly at that sliver of naked flesh.

she was saying,

he asked.

Her warning slapped into his mind, but he didn’t flinch. Whatever she was planning, it had put her in a position he had never believed possible: Frea needed him.

she asked.

There was a sour taste in the back of Rho’s mouth and he took another swig of wine.

the Shadar existed. I don’t know how the emperor figured out about the blood and the swords, but we attacked right after that.> Rho reached across the table and ran his fingers lightly over Frea’s wrist. To his surprise, she didn’t pull away. Slowly, he pushed the sleeve of her shirt further up her forearm.

He was stroking her forearm, lightly but insistently, and he saw her fingers move, responding to his touch. Then she stood up suddenly, knocking the table, and he caught the jug just before it fell. Wine sloshed over his hands and ran onto the table and the floor.

Frea looked down at him. Her words fell softly into his mind: the stillness of a frozen lake, a moonless winter night.

And then she told him her plan, and he marvelled at how badly he’d underestimated her ambition. He had thought only of the damage the boy’s power could do in the Shadar, but Frea had seen beyond that: she had seen a weapon that could turn other weapons against those who wielded them. Her genius for mayhem took his breath away.

He held the jug of wine out to her, keeping his hand steady even though a red mist swam up in front of his eyes from the pain jabbing at his side.

Frea took the jug and drained it to the bottom.