Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (74 page)

“What did you find?” asked the king.

“A village,” he replied. “Burned to the soil it was raised upon. Only magik could have laid waste like we saw.”

“Survivors?”

“I cannot say, my King. There were no bodies for me to make a claim for or against the living.”

“No bodies?”

“Not even a tooth.”

“I see,” said the king. He stood and dumped his cup onto the fire, which rose and sparked gloriously. “There are bodies, I am certain: able bodies, working bodies, bodies for foot soldiers, slaves, and whatever other meat cogs Brutus needs for his war machine. If they are not dead, those people are elsewhere. I believe that I have underestimated my brother. I had believed him to be a rabid beast, loose and mad. Yet he seems to be more cunning than I expected. He is prepared for us, likely more prepared than we are ourselves.”

Walking away, Magnus abandoned his warmasters with that chilly notion to tuck into their bedrolls and guarantee them a restless sleep. Erik ran after his master and found him reading the stars of the South, looking for a meaning or sign, perhaps, to tell them how doomed they could be.

IV

The days fled while the army marched farther south. There was no end to the heat, to the furnace they had entered, and when the men looked up to the shimmering skies they could imagine themselves walking upon the sun. What had begun as a plain became a wasteland where the dusty soil split like the lips of a desert castaway, and no life but the smallest and many-legged crawled. By night, the land was so viciously heated that just as relief would come, the dawn returned. For the army, there was little rest, less conversation, and dwindling food to quiet even the despair of their stomachs. They were hard men, though, and brave men, and it was their spirits that kept them moving ahead.

Each day this mettle was tested, though, as they passed another deserted and scorched tract that had once been a village. Whatever culling the mad Sun King had commanded, it had taken all the fiefs in his lands. Before long, the scouting parties were sent out no more, and if someone spotted a black haze, he turned his stare back to the road ahead and mentioned it to no one. Alone the soldiers marched, through sand and blistering heat, as if they were the sole wanderers in a primeval time that only Magnus and his brother had seen. Magnus thought of these earlier eras often; with every hoofbeat closer to Zioch, he slipped deeper into his state of waking memory. In those vast silences, where even the shuffling and clank of the army faded to a meditative hum no different than the thrumming of rain, Magnus lived amid the glories and strife of his long, long life. He was looking for the thread that had unraveled his brother, looking for whatever weakness had turned Brutus into this defiler of life, and yet he could not discover a single cause. Only a multitude of smaller signs precipitating the decay into madness.

We who slept like cubs in the Long Winter, you who nursed me like a mother with your blood. When I left you for Lila, any man with a head outside his bliss could have foreseen how you would have perceived my choice. Betrayal. Here I thought we were being men apart, learning to live above our natures. But you never wanted that, did you, Brutus? How long has that hate festered in you? That jealously and abandonment? How much has it worn down your spirit to let the dark voice in? I still hate you, my brother. I shall still rip you raw with thunder and ice for what you have done, but I shall do so with love as well as fury. We have drawn this line, and we shall cross it together. I made a terrible mistake for choosing to live as man. When this is over, if we cannot die, if you are to suffer for all eternity, then I shall do what I should have done a thousand years ago. I shall never leave you again
.

Again and again, Erik watched his master sparkle with frost under the dreadful sun and knew that terrible broodings were taking place. But he offered the king no counsel, as he knew that this mood could not be broken by words. Erik’s own miseries kept him occupied anyhow, for the black villages and enervating march across a lifeless landscape were tipping the scales away from victory. What awaited them in Mor’Keth was uncertainty, and there was a chance that he would have to use the king’s gambit. While he
knew he should not, he fondled the cold talisman the king had given him—playing with it when the camp was asleep or the king was lost in one of his trances—and pondered his responsibilities, each of them more than a man should bear himself.

Warn a kingdom. Prepare for a war. Protect the queen
.

The third thought repeated itself more than the rest, and with the delirious heat, he found himself reflecting upon the queen, even though he had vowed to abstain from such fancies. His feelings were a weakness, and he should not be indulging them so near to battle. And yet he was no worse than the men and women whom he would see from time to time caressing a locket with a cameo of someone they loved back in Eod.
Only she doesn’t love you, you fool
, he would spit to himself.
She was only kind to you in the most innocent of ways, and you have distorted her kindness into something it was not
. But the mind played tricks of that fated instance, and no matter how many times he played the scene in his mind, he was no less convinced that he had imagined that spark, that connection.

He isn’t happy with the assignment: playing porter to Queen Lila while her Sword Rowena is away on unexplained business that he is told does not concern him. A woman’s troubles, he thinks, matters of which he is as innocent as a schoolboy, for he does not seek the company of women or know much about how they work. He does not seek the company of men, either. He has himself, which is enough, and a few quick sands of tugging when the desire boils in him like a kettle of lust that needs to be poured out. But otherwise, sex is a distraction from duty; release is a necessary oil to one’s armor, and it should be done as efficiently and frequently as the weekly hammering out of the kinks in one’s plate
.

The presence of gyrating women in silk shawls is what has brought on these odd, distracting thoughts. He squints them away and makes note to tend to his desire tonight, lest it continue its imbalance in his humors. The Faire of Fates is busy today: Carthacian traders bickering over the value of their rarities, rivermen from the Feordhan all but throwing salted fish at passersby, the well-fed urchins of Eod doing tricks like trained dogs for fates. Still, danger can come from any shape, young or old, and he watches them all as if they hold a knife in their hands. His great feliron hammer might be upon his back, but it is a speck’s reach and a cat’s reflex away
.

In an hourglass, they have completed whatever mysterious womanly duties the queen has set out for herself—visits to silk shops and perfumeries and bakers—and they are leaving the Faire of Fates when they pass the most obvious threat: a platform on which a wizened, manic-stared man rants about the injustices brought on since the Nine Laws. Since it has been only a decade since the Charter was written, not all of Eod’s citizens are happy with the decree that all men are equal. Some would have things return to the simpler state of master and lesser men, and it is known by the court that the Iron sages of Menos secretly funnel coin to Eod to feed these dissenting voices and organizations, which the king has not cracked down upon, as the divisiveness of opinions is a quality of a free nation. After this incident, Magnus’s perception and ruling on radical voices will change
.

“We are not the same! Not equal, not by blood, name, or right! None of us!” screams the anarchist. For a frothing madman, he has drawn a considerable crowd: the drunk and angry poor—men who can no longer use the excuse of class disparity for their failures; haughty masters and their trembling servants; and rough strangers in cloaks, who would be the sort upset when the Silver Watch did checks on their skycarriages to find people in chains
.

“Why, then, do we still have a king?” continues the anarchist. “If all are supposed to be equal? Why do we not tear down the palace, tear down King’s Crown, and see this dream of privilege for all fully realized? Why am I—and you and he and they—made lesser than what we were yesterday, while our king rules the same as before? No charter, I say! No laws! No king to rule and certainly”—the anarchist has spotted the regiment; he points toward it and roars—“no queen!”

A roar is met by the crowd around him, and the hateful stares turn to the queen and her company. This is the perfect storm for violence, an alignment of forces and fates that could only have been arranged by the wickedest Menosian mind—although this will never be proven. Foolishly, the queen makes matters worse by halting her procession and trying to beseech the madman for calm. But her charm will not work on persons so filled with hate, and before she has even made a small pardon, the first stone is tossed. As the hammer, he is vigilant, he is a living weapon, and he sees the cruel old woman in the crowd reach into her kirtle and rear her arm back. His reflexes have moved faster than her malice, however, and he has spun his steed and intercepted the stone with his
body. That act shatters the delicateness of the situation, and violence crashes out in a tidal wave: a wave of shouting bodies and fists and weapons drawn from hidden pockets
.

Chaos has seized the marketplace, and the mob is upon them at once. One of the Watchmen tries to raise his whistle, but he and his steed are pulled to the ground. The others of the queen’s guard cluster around their precious sovereign and cut at any hands that draw too near, painting their white horses in freckles of blood. With his savage instincts controlling him, Erik grips the reins of Queen Lila’s mare in one hand; in the other, he wields his trusty hammer, sweeping men away like dust to a broom. He is doing his best to guide the regiment out of the vicious bog of treason and toward the panic-stricken streets where they might break into a canter. Suddenly, he smells the ozone of magik and through the glaze of blood and movement, he sees the anarchist upon the podium crackling with red light like a powder keg and likely about to go off much the same. He realizes that they need a distance they may not have time to make, so he does what duty would have him do: he casts away his weapon, saddles up next to the queen, screams, “Trust in me!” and then throws the two of them to the ground with his body over hers
.

The blast heaves the earth a speck later: vomiting destruction, tossing horses, people, and stones like paper cutouts. Yet while shrapnel and flames shower down, the queen is safe beneath her metal mountain. The explosions have dimmed to screams, and he removes himself from his charge, drags her to her feet, and stumbles through the smoldering vapors that have become the Faire of Fates. He needs to get the queen somewhere secure; no other concern matters—not his limping leg or the bent shards of armor in his back. Like an angry mule, he kicks aside whatever hindrances of wood or flesh present themselves. He is frenzied and not particularly heeding his surroundings beyond finding something calm
.

“Stop,” says Queen Lila. “You must stop.”

She is not the one whose commands he obeys, not the father who found him in the Salt Forests, and yet he cannot deny her request. Not with his body, anyhow, for whatever toll he has taken in shielding her is too grave, and he spins and falls on a hard stone floor with glimpses of rafters and the scratches of hay at his fingers—which have lost their gauntlets during flight. While the queen mumbles, he blinks in and out of darkness. He can feel his essence bleeding
out of himself as if a warm towel has been laid over his back, though the pain itself is too strong for him to feel. Sliding, sliding into numbness and darkness, walking down the long black stairs to oblivion he goes. At least the queen has been protected. He will visit his ancestors with pride and is glad that he has not failed his kingfather. He so easily accepts death. He does not fear it, not as he fears failure. His eyes close, and there is only the dark staircase. He wants to see where it leads, what mystery awaits him
.

And then the light fills him: his heart leaps, his eyes flick open, and a groan of ecstasy breathes him back to life. What is this that has awakened him? What is this that strips raw every nerve in his body and swells every sense tenfold? Magik. The soul of another has touched his. He sees the stable where he is risen—the horses, sunshine, pails, and other insignificant things—but more than those he sees the woman who saved him before taking that final step. He sees her fretting gaze of gold and her sympathy that pains and elates him with a rush like fire up his spine. Is it inappropriate, his sudden urge? The desire to touch the face of this woman? He does not consider decorum or stop himself, but reaches to the queen and cups her face in a rough manner that her shiver indicates she is clearly not used to. Yet she does not retract herself from him. Time drags into eternity, though eventually the alarms and the besmirching of the queen’s beauty with his grimy prints awakens him from the moment. He remembers his duty and discovers his shame
.